UMES-CHAT: A campus mobile social application for improving study experience of students, by students, and for students

Abstract

Social networking apps have penetrated every aspect of students' daily life. However, many students are experiencing communication difficulties in their learning process. In this paper, we present our work, 'UMES-Chat', a mobile social network application that serves mainly for education purposes. It is developed with Xcode © on the iOS platform and utilizes XMPP protocol to communicate with the phone. By the use of the app, college students can effectively communicate with each other and faculty, to discuss, share information, solve learning issues, and work in teams on course projects. In addition, the mobile application is being proposed, designed and developed by students as the senior design project. Students' engagement and professional development are greatly improved through this process. Moreover, the project is also developed as a teaching tool for related courses such as Programming Languages and Embedded Systems, and can be used as a template for many software/hardware projects for students in the future.