Adam Carter

Sandwiched in between development of the BOSS and CEC systems is my senior capstone project: the Learning Environment and Activity Portal (LEAP). It sounds pretty fancy, but it’s actually just a glorified chat program.

This project is significant because it is the first somewhat large-scale project that I have completed as part of a team. Luckily, my team was comprised of people who I liked and generally got along with. But, that’s not to say there wasn’t a high-tension fight or two.

Overall, I am not very happy with our end product. Having a team that ranged so much in skill and experience (I was the only person with a serious PHP background) made it difficult to collaborate. Yet, even if I did have a super-skilled team, I wouldn’t have been happy with the project. As I mentioned earlier, we were building a chat program. There are hundreds of different chat programs on the market, and with the exception of MathML support, ours had nothing special to offer.

At the end of the term, we presented our project to the CS faculty, alumni, and students. I’d say that ours was easily one of the top three best projects. Seeing so many failures made me feel better about my project. Perhaps my expectations were just too high.

LEAP Online runs on the same server as the Civic Engagement Center’s website: a custom-build Linux machine running Apache 2.2.3, PHP 5.2, and MySQL 5.0. Graphic design was once again done by Kathryn Model.