A Simulation of a mobile application for accessing academic information

Abstract

As information technologies reshape classrooms and other learning environments world over, students and educators have become more comfortable with accessing and sharing electronic information and such an experience is no exception to Makerere University. Powerful social, technological, and commercial factors are driving the world to a mobile society. The proliferation of digital devices and popularity of the Internet is leading people from students to business executives, to expect information everywhere at anytime. Voice and data are becoming integrated into mobile platforms, and higher capacity wireless communications standards such as 802.11X and GPRS are vastly improving user experience. Our project therefore explores the steps behind the simulation of a mobile application and the implementation of such a system for accessing students‘ academic information at Makerere University. Our primary goal was to simulate a Mobile Application prototype that would be used to demonstrate how an actual implemented system would be used by a student to easily use to access and view academic information. We analysed and designed a Mobile Application system that can be used for accessing academic information such as results in Makerere University. To a big extent, we focused more on simulating a Mobile Application interface to be used as the client side and built databases to store the examination results at the server side. We expect with the implementation of such a system the students will be able to access academic information faster, cheaper and user-friendly than the current desktop systems and notice boards which have often led to complains of long queues, data loss and inconveniences. We also attempted to look at the common features of the Mobile technologies and how the implementation of such a system can be improved as our recommendations.