MIS 3502 Project Reflections
For the semester long project in MIS 3502, the second in the series of required coding classes, teams developed web applications for “clients” from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). We accomplished this using a combination of HTML, CSS/Bootstrap, PHP, JavaScript/jQuery, and SQL, building our applications from scratch. In MIS 3506, we built a prototype using Justinmind, dragging and dropping elements on a page, not actually creating a robust database structure or coding anything. For this project, we did the exact opposite, coding it all! And the results were more satisfying. We used some design specifications to brand it as CHOP, but everything we saw on the browser, we created. The database structure we designed and how our application interacted with it was much more complicated than anything we had been exposed to throughout our courses. I spent most of my time devoted to functionality, making sure that each page and every function worked as intended, at times nesting multiple layers of loops and conditions within a single PDO function. The biggest challenge my team encountered was when collaborating. Unlike with others projects where a lot of the work can be done using software such as MS SharePoint and Google Docs/Sheets/Slides, allowing teammates to work concurrently, we had no tool to use for co-coding. So we were especially careful when more than one person was working at a time, and did our best to use a sheet to sign-out the application. That way we all would know who was currently working on it and could avoid making changes at that time. This was the most challenging project to coordinate and taxed my brain like no other, but it was quite possibly the most satisfying experience I had in MIS. I just wish more people could have seen what was “under the hood,” because much of the work done is not visible on the user’s side, and I think it was pretty darn good after just two coding classes!