Each spring, second year Computer Science students in Theory and Practice of Object Oriented Programming work on a team project to develop a software application for a SUNY Ulster campus customer. This course, taught by Professor John Sheehan and Dr. Lou Thomason, provides an opportunity for students to gain practical experience in software development while also giving back to the college community. This semester, Team Ellie ++, which consisted of students Leonard Carcaramo, Dominic Cerchia, and Eryk Cole, worked with the faculty in the Veterinary Technology program to update a web-based tool for tracking student veterinary skills assessments.
The Vet Tech program is required to keep track of which students have completed a set of veterinary skills and must be able to provide these records when they have accreditation reviews by the AVMA. They previously tracked these records on paper and kept large binders of books for all their students, which needed to be kept on file for a long time. The Vet Tech faculty were unable to enter student skill information into the existing electronic system fast enough for it to be worth using over the paper records.
With this problem in mind, the Computer Science students built a web application that tracks these students’ accredited skills online, providing the Vet Tech program with a much more efficient and environmentally friendly record keeping system. The project was first started by a team of students in 2018, but required some fine tuning. This spring, the new team made some critical improvements to the project by adjusting the existing system so that entering student skill information could be done easily and quickly. They also made a number of small fixes to make the application more robust. Throughout the project, the team worked closely with all the Vet Tech faculty to ensure the system would meet their needs.
Leonard Carcaramo, student leader of Team Ellie ++, says, “The Theory and Practice of Object Oriented Programming course goes above and beyond how to code, and teaches Computer Science students how to work in a software development team similar to how software development teams work in the industry.”
A big thank you to these students for their hard work helping the SUNY Ulster community! Check out some of the other ways Computer Science students are going far.
