The Salvation Army Project
My Experience in Helping to Build The Salvation Army Web Application
Building a big software system has been the most exciting skill that I have learned as a computer science major student. Moreover, using the skills to address a need in the community is one of the personal goals I keep to my mind. Thus, building a web application for the Salvation Army nonprofit was not only a new learning experience but also a life-changing one. Throughout the semester, I learned a lot from group work, meeting with the client to identify a problem, finding resources to use, communicating effectively in a team, and making progress towards project completion.
My learning experience starts with the first meeting with our community partner. Sitting at the Salvation Army office and hearing about various challenges that the organization faces during their volunteering activities felt very different from sitting in typical student group meetings that I have had prior to discussions about the class projects. Since the salvation army representative had no background in technology, it required a bit of effort to transform her thoughts and ideas into a list of use cases and stories that my group would follow in building a database web system for the Salvation Army. For instance, she stressed the difficulty of her experience in handling logistics about volunteers and keeping track of the record about their work. She said that the Salvation Army still uses printed papers to record information about volunteers and all associated information about volunteers’ work. However, since the organization has been running for a long time, it has reached to point where the Salvation army faces a challenge of going back to look at the records of volunteers and providing reports to them.
As a computer Scientist, as I was hearing about all these issues, it helped me to think about how I could use the skills I have been learning this semester to tackle some of the challenges the Salvation Army was facing. My group and I wrote down a few notes to help us reflect and met later to analyze how we could build a database system for the salvation Army. However, we did not have all the skills required to carry out the project. As our class CSCI 340 progressed we accumulated all the knowledge we needed and put them to use by making progress on the Salvation Army project. For instance, after learning about doing mock-ups, we transformed ideas from the Salvation army representative into interactive web pages and used them to flesh out the look and feel of the project before beginning implementation. This new skill helped me to reflect back on the community needs that my group was addressing and allowed me to think creatively while providing a solution to those needs.
As the semester progressed, we had two more meetings with our community partner for us to receive feedback about the work we were doing. The more progress we made on the project, the more I felt empowered in the work I was doing as a student. For instance, on our second client meeting, the community partner interacted with the project we had at the time and gave us feedback about a few issues we needed to address. Moreover, she appreciates the work we deed and encouraged us to keep some of the features the project had. On the third meeting, we had a lot of work done already and we received much more constructive feedback from the community partner.
Even though my personal interaction with the community partner was smooth, there was a lot to learn as far as group collaboration goes. Most of my group members were active in making progress towards project completion. However, all of us were going on different paces. For the first month, it felt like only two people were doing work that seemed to advance the project forward while everyone else’s work that had no direct effect on the project. This issue presented a challenge since it was usually difficult to address this problem in our group without offending anyone. In addition, I learned to be patient in this process because some of my group members despite working slowly, they were very motivated to help in completing the project.
Last but not least, as I was completing this project and reflecting on various tasks I accomplished on it, I had a feeling of joy that proved to me that I can use computer programming to make a change in my society. Specifically, as I aspire to do this kind of work as a profession in the future, working with the Salvation Army gave a framework that I will use to observe problems in the community and identify sustainable solutions for them through software engineering.