Title: Honors Student Creates Software App to Help College Assessment Committee Manage Data

Kyle Adams is developing an app that will help one of the college’s assessment committees manage their needed data captured across multiple assessment cycles for his Honors thesis.

Kyle Adams has been writing code with his friends since high school. As an Honors student in the Computer Science program, Kyle has been working on many software app development projects. For a project associated with his Honors thesis, he decided to work on developing an app that will help one of the college’s assessment committees manage their needed data captured across multiple assessment cycles.

Kyle Adams has been interested in being a programmer/developer since he attended high school in the Niagara Falls, NY area. Currently a senior, he is also a member of the Honors College. His interest in software development led him to undertake many software application development projects in the course of his academic career at Brockport, including a software development practicum sponsored by Paychex that he worked on during his sophomore year itself - in the course of which he worked with technical personnel from Paychex, in a team with his fellow students. His success in delivering on this project motivated him to take additional software engineering classes, and work as a student programmer on the college’s web team as well, and also do some “freelance” work on his own time as a web developer.

For a project that is going to form part of his Honors thesis, Kyle decided that he wanted to develop a product that would be of help to somebody - i.e., solve their “real world” problem through the application of technology. He wanted to do something that would enable him to demonstrate that innovative application of technology can really help an individual or a small organization - out. After some exploration, he is now working on a project that will enable the college’s Institutional Learning Outcomes Assessment Committee (ISLOAC) move away from storing the data they captured on paper, in disparate spreadsheets, or in files with different data formats - and enable them to store it in a custom-designed relational database. By building a front end app to this database as well, Kyle seeks to enable the college to have an easy interface to entering, retrieving, and updating this data, across multiple assessment cycles lasting a number of years. Generating customized reports that could also possibly go into the self-study documents is also part of his aims. We hope that Kyle’s contributions and dedication to his work eventually lead him to a suitable professional position he seeks.