OSU Honors

An events app for the Oregon State University Honors College

What is OSU Honors?

My friend Adrian and I developed the OSU Honors App. The point of the app is to connect the Honors College community and get more people going to events. In the past, events were mainly sent out in a long weekly email which most students, including me, skimmed over or deleted before even looking at them.

The Honors College wanted an app to make events more clear and reach more students, including push notifications when students register for events. Adrian and I worked with Toni Doolan, the dean of the Honors College, and many other HC staff to create a full iOS and Android app for events, as well as an Admin Panel website. Later this term, the app will expand to have other resources for Honors students as well.

We were able to complete the first version of the app and admin panel in 6 weeks, just in time for the incoming Honors students. I was invited to speak at the new student induction event for the Honors College, where most of the new freshmen downloaded the app and tried it out.

Me presenting the app at Induction to 600 new Honors College Freshman

The App

The app home page, event detail view, and settings tab

The notification settings page lets you control when you get reminded about events you've registered for, and also lets you get notifications for events with certain tags. Notification scheduling and sending are handled by Google Cloud Tasks and Firebase Cloud Messaging. I wrote backend code to handle scheduling events for the correct time, and also to send the right notifications to the right users.

The app supports multiple notification tokens for each user, so you can be notified on all the devices you sign in on. Additionally, the app updates notification preferences in real-time for each device, so all your settings will stay up to date.

Push Notifications

Confetti

Custom confetti emojis can be added to events to make them more fun to register for. The confetti animation is optional and is played after the user registers for an event.

While Adrian focused on the Admin Panel and Single Sign-On integration, I worked on the app, database, and notifications. This was my first time working in React Native, but I was able to catch on pretty quickly and build the app. My goal was to make the app simple and straightforward, while also having all the features a student would want. In the end, the app turned out how I wanted, and I was able to work with new things such as system calendar integration, push notifications on Android, and the In-App Browser.

The Admin Panel

The Admin Panel is built in React and lets Honors College staff edit events, send push notification updates, edit tags, and grant or remove access to other admins. This part of the project was mainly done by Adrian, but I also helped fix some bugs and do UI design.

The Admin Panel home page and edit event page

The tag editor on the Admin Panel

Working as a Team

While starting the project, Adrian and I had to learn how to work effectively as a team, since this was our first project together. We organized our tasks so we were working on separate parts of the project (Admin Panel vs App), but had to work together for new features, the database, sign-in, UI design, and testing. We worked in areas we were more familiar with (app dev vs web dev) but pushed ourselves to learn new things (I had no prior experience with React Native and Adrian had no prior experience with databases). In the end, we were able to get tasks done and communicate effectively, both with each other and with the stakeholders. We plan to continue to work together on future projects.

Database Design

We decided to go with Firebase for our database since I had prior experience with it and we knew it would work well and be easy to set up for our needs. It ended up working pretty well for us, apart from linking OSU's SSO to a Firebase Auth account, which was difficult to figure out how to do without using any sketchy workarounds. We did get the sign-in implemented securely though, and we also added detailed security rules in the database to keep it secure.

Here is a full list of our implementation:

SAML for SSO linked with Firebase Auth
Firestore for database
Cloud Storage for images (+ compression)
Cloud Messaging for push notifications
Firebase Dynamic Links for event links & app download
Cloud Functions for backend
Firebase Analytics & Crashlytics
Firebase Hosting (admin panel, SSO)

Programmed with

TypeScript

Utilizing

React Native

Firestore

Cloud Functions

Cloud Storage

GitHub