Vision Statement

To help nourish quality education among current and future students at the University of Texas at Arlington through open student and teacher discussions. We want to be successful in helping students avoid situations that can lead to stress, depression, and failure through poor choices of professors or class combinations while giving professors a medium to communicate and take feedback from reviewers.

Project Description - UTA Reviews (currently in beta)

Our app (UTAReviews) plans to provide current and future students (future students as in students who attend the university in the future but not currently) of the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) a tool that allows detailed reviews and discussions of professors at UTA. An issue with other tools such as RateMyProfessor and Reddit is that RateMyProfessor does not allow for detailed reviews and discussions, the issue with Reddit is that it is not centralized. We hope to bring the ability for students to leave extensive reviews and allow them to discuss amongst each other, rate each other's reviews or comments, and review the professors being reviewed, and have it centralized to UTA specifically.

There are currently only plans to make this application through Android development with Android Studio. We are looking at possibly making a website to allow more users the opportunity to use our application but for the time being, we only plan Android development.

Link to Project Demo

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/robert-carr-90561a238_java-xml-uta-activity-6933974191104806912-NG5d?utm_source=linkedin_share&utm_medium=member_desktop_web

Requirements

Since this application is designed for the UTA student body, you must have access to an email that ends in @mavs.uta.edu or @uta.edu. Students have @mavs.uta.edu emails and professors have @uta.edu.

If a website is made, the goal is to have the information containted on the website available to view to the public, but the only ones who can rate and leave reviews are verified students at the University of Texas at Arlington. Replies to comments and reviews will be avaiable to both verified students and professors.

Compile Instructions

1. Download project into Android Studio
2. Make sure the right Android SDKs are selected under File -> Settings -> Appearance & Behavior -> System Settings -> Android SDK Check all that are listed below:
   1. Android API 31 <-- Under SDK Platforms
   2. Android 11.0 (R) <-- Under SDK Platforms
   3. Android SDK Build-Tools 33-rc1 <-- Under SDK Tools
   4. Android SDK Command-line Tools (latest) <-- Under SDK Tools
   5. Android SDK Platform-tools <-- Under SDK Tools
   6. Intel x86 Emulator Accelerator (HAXM installer) <-- Under SDK Tools
3. Start run in Android Studio (shift + F10)
   1. If you are getting errors, it may be because of Gradle issues, a fix to this could be by going to File -> Invalidate Caches / Restart.
   2. Once there, click the Invalidate and Restart Button, allow Android Studio to restart and then try running the app again.

Known Issues

1. Performance for search results can be slow depending on the hardware being used.
2. When clicking on staff members who have any "." in there name, app will crash because of a Firebase contraint on "." being in the child name.

Known Issues That Have Been Fixed

1. Formatting issues for longer reviews or replies. Formatting is fine if the review or reply is not large. <-- fixed 5/21/22
   1. Formatting should appear correctly now on both reviews and replies, even with larger texts.

Screenshots

Login Page

Professor Search

Posting a Review

Review Page

Expanded Comment Section