Honors Program Web and Mobile Application

The University of Wyoming Honors Program provides its students with access to special coursework, scholarships, and priority class registration. Administrative overhead is generated as a result of providing these services. Currently, students are advised of scholarship opportunities and events via email. Priority registration occurs through the use of paper sign-up sheets to collect student information. Students currently do not have a method of saving general information for use with Honors Program-specific scholarship applications. The project's goal was to provide a comprehensive platform that addressed the administrative needs of Program staff. We chose to use a LAMP stack due to its flexibility. A web interface was created in a self-hosted CentOS 7 virtual environment using the PHP MVC framework Laravel, powered by a MySQL database. The interface allows for administrators of the site to add/edit/delete items such as News Articles, Web Pages, Program Events, and Scholarship Opportunities. The interface allows administrators to send alerts and notifications to the student base. Registration events can be created and posted so that priority registration and event attendance can be tracked and associated with either a student's login information or a one-time code. The application utilizes QR codes as a method of quickly registering a student as having attended an event. We also created a side-by-side Android mobile application to allow students to quickly and easily access the data from the web interface via our web API and allow for the administrators to update students via push notifications.