Canadian Alliance for Intergenerational Living

SAIT Capstone Project 2023

01 Intro

For my 2023 Capstone Project, my group worked closely with the Canadian Alliance for Intergenerational Living to create an essential task tracker web app so that the organization can monitor student progress.

02 Problem

The organization allows affordable housing to students in exchange for spending time with seniors. In order to accurately log these tasks, they needed an app that can be used by both the organization and students.

03 Solution

A lightweight, flexible web app that enables students to easily create tasks and log their monthly progress, in addition to allowing admins to easily manage and track student data at a glance.

04 Research Methods

We met with Silvera, the company working with CAIL to house and work directly with the students, in order to acquire all of their requirements for what our web app should provide.

In general, Silvera wanted the app to be as hands off as possible with an emphasis on ease of use and accessibility. Students should be using the app solely to mark what tasks they have done and to track what they need to do, and both CAIL and Silvera will only use the app to collect the task data and lightly manage users.

05 High Level Requirements

We divided our requirements based on use case and view, with the app being split on Student Use Case and Admin Use Case:

Student:

1. Task Creation, Management and Tracking

2. Calendar Functionality

3. Hour tracking

Admin:

1. Creation and Management of Student Information

2. Data Retrieval for Reporting

3. Banked Hours Tracking

06 Evaluation & Testing

Upon contact with CAIL we established client check-ins every 2 weeks, with most of testing done internally until March where we had our clients test the app as both student and admin. The continuous client check-ins helped us stay focused on what needs to be done on a bi-weekly basis. Client testing was integral in allowing us to add in additional tweaks and changes that greatly improved the app for student and admin use.

07 Final Outcome

By the end of the semester we were able to successfully integrate all requirements and evaluations to create the desired webapp for the client. The tools used to create the webapp included Figma for the UI/UX and wireframing, MongoDB to handle the backend, and a frontend tech stack including Vercel, React, NextJS, and TailwindCSS.

08 Future Work

Upon the completion and presentation of this Capstone Project, CAIL notified us that they would be integrating the app within the organization by the end of the summer. It would be launched as the students start their Fall Semester, with additional student testing done beforehand. Short term goals for the webapp that would be completed before full launch will include:

1. Transfer of deployment and build of app across platforms if needed

2. Accessibility improvements such as localization and screen reader optimization

3. Outlook integration, allowing for email notifications