FCS News

Each year the Dal App Challenge, sponsored by the office of the Provost and Vice-President Academic, has inspired students to design apps that could be used by the university or fit a university need.

“The purpose of the contest is multifold,” says Alex Brodsky, professor in the Faculty of Computer Science. “[It’s] to generate ideas for mobile apps that [organizations] may wish to pursue; motivate students to think about how they can improve campus life; get students working with current technologies and acquire new skills; and create opportunities for students to add to their portfolios.”

Life extends beyond campus. This year, the competition was opened so that students could create apps aimed at improving any aspect of student life - within Dalhousie and beyond.

2015 Dal App Challenge Winners

1st Place: "DalBuddy", Anh Dang, Kiet Le & Abidalrahman Mohammad 

The primary use of DalBuddy is to allow students to find friends within the Dalhousie community to meet in a sport, social, car share, or academic activity. 

Use-cases: 

Sports: John just started his undergrad at Dalhousie and does not have any friends at the moment. He wants to find someone to play badminton with. He sets the time and location that suits him in hopes that another Dalhousie student is interested and available.

Study: Susan is having difficulty studying for her Math 101 test. She books a room in the library and posts a Math 101 study event and sends the invitation to her friends, Adam and Peter.

Car-Share: It is a stormy day. Dalhousie cancelled classes after 1:00 pm. Owen wants to find out if anyone can give him a ride home to Beechville. He searches the Car Share events and finds that Ali can drop 3 people off in Beechville.

Social: Tuesday is the movie night discount. Anh wants to find if anyone want to join him to watch an exciting movie. He posts an event and sends invitations to all his friends. 

Other: Ishan lives in India. He will join Dahousie this fall. He knew about DalBuddy from the Dalhousie website and used it to find some fellow students to join him on orientation day. He posted a general event and some students from his future department responded.

2nd Place: "Dal Rate", Zihao Wu 

This app is used to rate courses at the Faculty of Computer Science and can be further extended across the university.

3st Place: "Halifax Events", XueFei Yang 

This app allows users to get event information from multiple data sources like CBC, destinationhalifax.com, Halifax Mooseheads, and events.dal.ca.

This app is a one-stop solution to allow users to find event information from multiple websites, quickly. This app can gather and parse the data automatically, so it can run without editors.

4th Place: "Dal Events", Ramkumar Velmurugan & Walter Thekkekara Adbe

Dal Events is a news feed application which will categorize news from the Dal website in a short and crisp form. The application will also act as an event management application that will post all events happening at Dal.  The application will constantly monitor the Dal website for news related to student life, sports, research and upcoming events. 

5th Place: "Club Hub", Matt Farrell 

A voting application where students get one vote per day. The application will have a list of the places students go at night for entertainment. Each place on the list will have a counter. If a student is going to the place that night they will vote on it, raising it's counter by 1.

Each morning the counter resets. Students can use this app to help them decide where to go that night. If the student wants to go to a busy spot, they will be able to see what places have more votes, and the same goes for looking for a place that isn't busy.