UNIVERSITY – a new application for university students is here
Author: Zuzana Dostálová
Students from the Faculty of Informatics and Management, University of Hradec Králové, have developed an application that will make university students’ life much easier.
Petr Weissar, Michal Černý and Dušan Salay have created an application that they very distinctly call Univerzita (Editor’s note: University). The application has been designed to help university students find their way around their faculty and the university. Not only around the campus, but also in terms of lectures, exams and course credits. The new application is equipped with basic functions, such as STAG. It will help you find your study schedule, timetable, building details and lecture room numbers. And you can even check out your classmates and their schedules. In addition to that, you can use the application to register for your exams and course credits and it will even automatically calculate your credits. So the application can help you keep an eye on what you’ve fulfilled and what you still need to do. An integral and inseparable part of the application is a function that sends you notifications that always keep you up-to-date about any changes, such as the cancellation of a class, or a new exam date. In the future, the developers plan to advance the application by adding another function allowing students to find out about various job opportunities. It will also include a module for teachers that they can use to upload students’ grades in real-time.
This new application builds on an already existing application, namely the UHK Helper, which saw the light of day in September 2016. At that time, it was not nearly as sophisticated as it is today, and the number of users has increased about eighteen times. “Associate Professor Poulová approached us and told us that it would be a good idea if the Foreign Office could send notifications to students about lectures and summer school. So, we came up with a notification module that turned into the UHK Helper application,” Petr Weissar explains how the application came about.
But the problem was that the original application construed for Android was created in Java, so we couldn’t modify it. “We realised that the UHK Helper cannot be further enhanced and developed. We did some research and realised that Informatics and Management Faculty students quite like the application and that many universities actually do not have such an application. So we decided to make it available to universities and students nationwide. And we started from scratch. We used Kotlin, a cross-platform programming language designed to fully operate with Java, and state-of-the-art technology,” adds Michal Černý. “The improved version needed a more robust solution. We decided that to facilitate and speed up the whole process it would be more sensible to find someone else who has more experience in the field and who will help us.” That is when Dušan Salay came into the picture. He focused on finding server solutions, on how to send notifications.
About 500 users are currently using the application in test mode. The creators planned to get the application up and running by the end of the summer semester in 2020. It should be accessible for both Android and iOS operating systems. You can download the app here. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.weissar.university
