We were recently asked to report on student engagement with an instance of Canvas which we had implemented for our client Enterprise Cube.

Canvas is an Open Source Learning Management System (LMS)
which enables trainers and teachers to create online resources for their students to work with outside of the traditional learning environment.

While the standard instance of Canvas provides some global reports, these lacked the detail that our client required in order to report back to their funders Affinity Sutton.

In order to provide this, we delved into the Canvas LMS complex back end code, and created a rake task which analysed the User Access table and collated this data into a csv flat file which is automatically generated on a weekly basis, and made available to the admin user.

Both our client, and us love working with Canvas which, to our minds leverages Rails’ succinct, powerful and readable code to produce a vast improvement on the more widespread Moodle and efront implementations.

If you’d like to get more from the data held within your Canvas LMS or you’re thinking about using canvas then why not drop us a line.  

We attended Last night’s TechHub event, “What App’enned to my App” which was exciting, interesting and inspirational. The CityGate sponsors presented a fantastic panel of guests to a packed room full of eager delegates.

Go Big, Go Niche or Go Home

The event had a fairly wide ranging take on the do’s and don’ts of app development, but these are my take home notes:

1. Pick your market sector, be specific, and make sure everything ensures they have get best possible customer experience from your application, right through checkout and beyond, and from your marketing.
2. Ensure you have a viable remuneration model, either from the start, or planned for a later development cycle.
3. Have a great team, people invest in great people with great ideas, not just great ideas!
4. Have a awesome product with no bugs, focus on user experience, right through the payment process, and test!
5. If you’ve got it, flaunt it!

If you went to the What App’enned to my App event too then why not contact us and let us know what you thought.

Smartphone Apps the simple way

We’ve recently released the mobile registration apps for StreetGames so thought we’d write a quick post on the technology we used to produce the apps. During the project we developed a mobile browser friendly website and apps, for iPhone and Android.

The apps enable Streetgames coaches to register the attendance of the participants at their doorstep sports clubs. These might take place in parks, leisure centres or anywhere with an open space big enough for sports. This meant that using desktop systems or paper were impractical or too cumbersome to rely on the data.

Having a mobile applications seemed like the simplest solution. This meant that coaches could login at the start of a session, quickly pull up a list of participants and mark attendance. The data could be stored, analysed and reused before the session has even ended! StreetGames were also keen to embed scanning functionality into the applications so that coaches could scan a barcode on the membership card of each participant to register their attendance.

PhoneGap

To reduce costs and delivery times we opted to use PhoneGap to develop the applications. PhoneGap is a free and open source framework that allows you to create mobile apps using standardised web APIs. Essentially, from our perspective, what this meant was that we could build the core of the application once and then with a little tweaking deploy to iPhone, Android and other handsets.

PhoneGap is now a well established and respected method of developing mobile applications. It’s been used by the BBC, exFM and a whole host of other app developers.

jQuery Mobile

To increase the speed of developing the user interface we opted to use jQuery Mobile. Using HTML5 and built on top of jQuery and jQuery UI, jQuery mobile offers a user interface system for all popular mobile device platforms including iPhone and android. Its lightweight code is built with progressive enhancement, and has a flexible, easily themeable design.

Coupled with PhoneGap, jQuery mobile helped us develop an elegant, professional mobile application for a fraction of the cost of developing native apps for each handset separately.

iPhone and Android

The StreetGames Mobile registration apps for Android and iPhone are available from the Apple and Google app stores now.

For more information about how 1UP could help you develop an iPhone, Android, Backberry or Windows Mobile app get in touch now.

We’re looking for experienced and talented developers to join our growing team here at 1UP.

You’ll be passionate about developing excellent quality web applications.  PHP, Ruby on Rails, JQuery, CSS and HTML are your tools and you’re confident and experienced with delving into the most advanced forward looking web technologies.  You’ll have a strong experience with version control (Git, Beanstalk) and interested in being part of a fast moving learning environment.

We’re searching for confident people who can manage their own time effectively and are ready to be part of a fun team in an emerging digital media firm in Birmingham.

If you think you might be perfect for us then please contact pete (at) dev.1updesign.org

(Absolutely no agencies please)

A cartoon representation of the Birmingham skyline, part of our illustration intern’s final major project for his Design degree at Birmingham City University.

Tel: 0121 572 6472