FIRST Aid Kit

[katiya1086]

Hi all! I'm sorry if this is posted in the wrong spot but I'm new to Chief Delphi and don't quite know my way around yet.

I'm participating in a Capstone (Senior) project program at my school where I am to solve a problem and then complete a huge project involving it. Being a Media Director on my team (Team 1086), I figured it would be a great opportunity to do something FIRST related. The problem I encountered was that there are not many mobile interfaces for information dealing with FIRST in general, so for my project I will be creating a "FIRST Aid Kit" of sorts. This app will serve as an aid to students, mentors, coaches, and even spectators at events by providing relevant information for each demographic in order to help further immerse people into the world of FIRST.

This is where I need your help. I need help deciding which features I should include in my app! These could be things such as:
- Team locators
- Mobile game manuals
- News feeds
- Event sign-up
- FIRST video database
- Etc.

I really hope that by the end of this project I can roll it out onto mobile devices. One day you might see this on your smartphone!

Please comment below with what YOU would like to see in a FIRST-centered app, as described above. Thank you!

[EricH]

I don't use a smartphone... but I will say that the #1 thing that you should have for the general public (or anybody interfacing with them) is a short, quick game explanation. Usually there's a good one-page one on the FIRST site. If the game animation is also handy, that would be about equally useful.

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by katiya1086

Hi all! I'm sorry if this is posted in the wrong spot but I'm new to Chief Delphi and don't quite know my way around yet.

I'm participating in a Capstone (Senior) project program at my school where I am to solve a problem and then complete a huge project involving it. Being a Media Director on my team (Team 1086), I figured it would be a great opportunity to do something FIRST related. The problem I encountered was that there are not many mobile interfaces for information dealing with FIRST in general, so for my project I will be creating a "FIRST Aid Kit" of sorts. This app will serve as an aid to students, mentors, coaches, and even spectators at events by providing relevant information for each demographic in order to help further immerse people into the world of FIRST.

This is where I need your help. I need help deciding which features I should include in my app! These could be things such as:
- Team locators
- Mobile game manuals
- News feeds
- Event sign-up
- FIRST video database
- Etc.

I really hope that by the end of this project I can roll it out onto mobile devices. One day you might see this on your smartphone!

Please comment below with what YOU would like to see in a FIRST-centered app, as described above. Thank you!

I'm going to go through what you listed and not sound like too much of a jerk and offer some criticism and support.

Team locators: the best idea you listed. FIRST's new Whats Going On search engine (?) is better at locating teams than I remember the old system, but like most things on FIRST's site, are dreadful on mobile when it comes to user experience.

Mobile Game Manuals: This is already supported pretty well with the web app FIRST uses. I can't remember if they run a dedicated app for it anymore, but the web app works well on mobile.

News feeds: not really sure what you mean by this. if you're talking about competition data, it feeds into the next thing...

Event sign-up: The mobile version of The Blue Alliance is very well-done. While not a dedicated app, it is far and away the class of FRC community built resources and I think it would be difficult to offer much more than what they do (them and FRC data scraping Zach Orr does).

FIRST video database: this is a really hard thing to do because FIRST presently doesn't have any standard way they want teams to upload videos they make to YouTube to make them easy to find and list by FIRST. I've looked into doing something like this in the past as part of a larger website, and this always had a hang-up. I guess you could provide your own standards or just bake in videos like the game animation.

I have some other ideas but I'm curious to see what you think of all of this.

[wilsonmw04]

Greetings,

As the mentor overseeing this project, I asked Katiya to query the CD community to find out what they are looking for in phone app. What she posted was her initial list if ideas. If you feel that some of these are well covered already, please let us know. If you think we have missed a hole in what the community is needing, please let us know that as well.

This is the first step in a roughly 12 week process. She wants to make a high quality project that the FIRST community can find value within. Your constructive comments are greatly appreciated.

[Jacob Bendicksen]

The thing is, most of these already exist. However, they aren't all in one centralized, easy-to-use location (in most cases they're not even close). I think what could really be awesome would be to have links to the FIRST team locator, game manual, etc. that are all integrated into an app (i.e. the app pulls the information from different sources into one simple location). That would be awesome.