Newswise — Ahead of guiding University of Oklahoma students through their study-abroad journey in Arezzo, Italy, program facilitators Randa Shehab and Zahed Siddique wanted a way for them to make a difference for Norman’s sister city.
They asked the mayor, Alessandro Ghinelli, what the city needed. The response was a mobile phone app for tourism, but Shehab and Siddique had all engineering students in the program. No computer science majors or faculty were on the trip. But with the experience they had in designing efficient operations and with other apps they had used, students teamed up and developed an app that will become a permanent part of Arezzo.
“It was such a well-received project. The students worked so hard,” Shehab said. “Now we’ve got a team working on it. We’re hoping to have something operational for the city in the next year.”
Some aspects of designing the app would have been right at home for OU students, based on architectural engineering sophomore Kaitlyn Faust’s description of Arezzo. Its similar size and nature to Norman make it a perfect match.
“Arezzo is compared to Norman in Italy,” she said. “It’s a suburban kind of area, but it’s also a historic city that’s been around for hundreds of years.”
That gave Faust’s team a lot of material for their aspect of the app.
Students were split into four to five groups, she said, to create different parts of the app, and her group had history.
“My group worked on innovative features to learn about what landmarks or museums were there to explore in Arezzo,” Faust said.
The features they came up with include an augmented reality walking tour, where people can use cameras on their phones to view certain buildings or landmarks and have information on those places right at their fingertips.
There’s also a historical scavenger hunt designed for kids — and interested and willing adults. And that’s just one aspect of the app. There are sections for restaurants and dining, shopping, outdoor adventures, citywide events and, of course, a map.
“If you’re a tourist, what are the key things you want to do when you go abroad?” Shehab said about how students developed the features. “We did it from the conceptualization through to the prototyping. It really forced them to situate in the study-abroad experience.”
The class worked on the app over the course of four weeks. Then, the group presented its app to Ghinelli and city leaders.
“It was such a well-received project,” Shehab said. “We’ve now started to partner with the computer science school, and they’re trying to do some implementation for their senior capstone course.”
For inspiration, Faust said students looked at what they have seen from other tourist and travel apps. Plus, they had a group’s worth of smartphone experience to know what they liked in an app.
“Our initial idea was very basic. Going through the program and having weekly meetings, getting their ideas helped push our app to become innovative and something no other city app has.”
Faust and her team’s work centered around research and mapping, but other groups, namely those who worked on the dining and shopping guide, interacted with local shop and business owners. All of the restaurants are “mom-and-pop” operations, she said, and the people of Arezzo were open to work with a bunch of Oklahoma students trying to learn more about their city.
“The citizens are super friendly to students,” she said. “Sometimes there’s a cultural barrier, but overall, I’ve never had any issues. They were all excited to have us there and to introduce us to their culture.”
RSS