Abstract

Nowadays, university students struggle to communicate with their fellow friends due to low social life. Especially for students at universities with large campuses or high number faculties, it can be challenging to create communica- tion among them. Since IZTECH covers a large area, it is hard for students to communicate with each other. Also, some of the official websites of IZTECH are not so clear. In our campus application named ”PortalIYTE”, we aim to help IZTECH’s students by enabling them to post about campus, lectures, daily life, sport activities, general problems, make discussions, ask about their lost objects, hitchhiking to Izmir or from Izmir etc.. Also, since the communica- tions are done anonymously, the students will feel more comfortable writing about whatever they want. In summary, PortalIYTE will solve most of the communication related problems of IYTE students by providing a web page that students can easily interact with each other.

1 Introduction

IZTECH is a much populated campus and it is very hard to share your ideas with people who share these ideas in large campuses. Students sometimes cannot reach other students or afraid of teachers or administrators of university. Or sometimes they wanted to a tennis friend to play tennis once in a week. But there is no any platform to share their complaint or announcement. PortalIYTE gives opportunity for students to socialize and create connection between their peers, talk about their issues on daily campus life, plan sport activities while securing their anonymity. Our system’s target audience is IZTECH campus students for now, but we can make our system country wide or provide different versions of our system to other campuses.

2 Problem Definition

Communication is very important for young people especially for people in a university.However communication is a big problem in IZTECH considering the largeness and location of the campus. We want to solve this issue by providing chatting, discussion and socialization environment in PortalIYTE. We believe that PortalIYTE will make students very happy with its various features. Our application offers solutions to several problems. We can list these as ; announcements, transportation, anony- mous idea sharing, finding groups for sport activities. Students usually gets university announcements from e-mails and university website. On the other hand they also need to follow certain social media accounts to get announce- ments from other activities. Our aim is to gather all this information in PortalIYTE and help students to keep track of daily events.

Sometimes students need to share their ideas anonymously. Some environmental factors can make students anx- ious and disable their ability to freely talk about their idea. Scott (2004) talks about how anonymity enables people to freely talk about their ideas in detail. PortalIYTE will enable IZTECH students to easily share what they think about anonymously by letting them post anything that is not issued to their real name. Students also need to have some fun. With the ”Memes” section of our application, students are able to share memes to entertain each other. They can also share news to inform other students and keep track of the events happening in the campus and world.

Transportation is another major problem for IZTECH considering the location of it.This problem may sound irrelevant when we are talking about a web portal but actually we bring a solution in this matter. Hitchhiking can be very useful especially when there are no public transports. Biggest problem about hitchhiking is to find an available car in a certain time for your need. There are no public place that people can talk about this topic. We want to solve this issue with the hitchhiking section of PortalIYTE. They will be able to see posts that other users share when they are traveling and will be easily able to comment under the post or reach to the post owner if they want to travel to the same place.

Finding groups for sport activities is another problem in the campus. We have lots of options in sports case like football, basketball, volleyball, tennis and much more. None of these activities can be done individually. Students who want to organize such an activity will be able to easily post about this in PortalIYTE sports section and students who just want to take part in such an activity can search for their desired sport and will be able to see organizing students’ posts.

There is a IZTECH forum which is still accessible but there is no active user base of this forum. The reasons for it can be listed as bad design, being an open forum for everyone and low usability. We are planning to implement a good design by following Gestalt principles, limited registration by only letting people register only if they have an active student mail account and high usability by continuous testing with people who are not in development team. In conclusion, IZTECH has lots of problems about socializing. We think that communication is the key to solve this problem. With the features of PortalIYTE that we talked earlier, most of the problems can be solved easily.

3 Literature Review

Global online communication platforms(Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc.) have been in our life for several years by now. They are mostly sufficient for communication among students but they all lack some special properties for becoming the best. They are global so they do not serve to only a portion of the population so things that users can do there are generic and not specific. With our platform, we aim to specify the potential user base to only IZTECH students so we can do more than just establishing the communication between students.

Ajibade et al. (2017) states that 96% percent of university students agrees with that social network technology is good for learning in universities. Our website will be a salvation for this since students can also post about lecture related things in our site. They will be able to post lecture notes or lecture books with each other without much effort or any lecture related things so, this will improve their learning.

Our website will enable our students to freely and anonymously talk about anything school related since they may fear to say what they actually think in a environment where their names are issued to their username. The article Jong et al. (2013) supports this claim by stating that the scores of students increase in an anonymous online environment compared to face-to-face environment since ”they may be influenced by interpersonal relationships and peer pressure, which can cause group members to interact in less desirable ways”.

There are already existing platforms that our students can communicate about the things we plan on doing. For example, there is a forum site of our university that already exists but it lacks the essential properties to be successful. For example, its design is not spectacular so users will not be so interested of using it. PortalIYTE will follow Gestalt principles and will have a better design to solve this problem. Also, another problem of that forum site is that anybody who wants to create an account can easily create an account there.The website does not check whether a user is a IZTECH student or not. PortalIYTE will only let the people who have an active IZTECH mail to register to the website. And finally, usability of that website is very poor so users have a hard time to get the information they need in the website. PortalIYTE will solve this problem by continuously making usability test with the ”out of development team” users and editing the site according to the received feedback.

Another important prospect of daily use of social media is COVID-19. With the lock down people of all ages used social media on the daily basis. In the long term this situation created addiction of internet and social media usage. The article Fernandes et al. (2020) shows the effects of COVID on the usage of social media on adolescents. It shows that with COVID-19, adolescents’ usage of social media increased by 2.5 hours daily (Table 4). With this increase on usage of social media it comes with some additional needs. With our project we aim to satisfy our campus’s students social needs with one web site.

4 Stages

Planning Stage: Started with planning of the purpose of the PortalIYTE. Brainstormed about how PortalIYTE could solve the problems at the problem definition section.

Designing Stage: We decided that design is the most important part of a forum website. We kept in mind that design should be very easy-to-understand and minimalist. Preparing wire-frame, preparing prototype and preparing first web-page is the milestones of this stage.

Development Stage: Develop front-end components. After that preparing the back-end structure for storing user data and website data (for example post at the forum). Merging the features like anonymous posting, announcements etc.

Testing Stage: The testing stage will be done in parallel with the deployment stage and will continue after the development stage ends. We tested our application according to the points included in the Section 6. We also had an alpha testing phase to test our product.

Deployment Stage: After all the development and testing stages are over and the product is ready for launch, we deployed our website using Google Cloud Service.

Maintenance Stage: After the deployment stage is successfully completed and we start to take some feedback from the users, we did bug fixes and add new features if needed.

5 Tools, Software, Hardware

We have developed our platform from the scratch. We used JavaScript and its framework called Vue3 and it’s framework Vuetify for front-end development and python Flask for back-end development. In front-end development, we used Visual Studio Code as our IDEs. We used MySQL and TablePlus for database management. We used Google Cloud to deploy our website. For mobile development we used Flutter for ios and android compatibility and developed inside Android Studio.

Hardware:

• Mustafa Fatih Can

Model:Hp ProBook 450 G8

CPU: 11th Gen Intel I5

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce MX450

RAM: 16 GB

• Deniz Kaya

Model:Hp Omen

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS

GPU: NVIDIA Geforce RTX 4060 16GB GPU

RAM: 16 GB

• Tu ̆gberk Varo ̆glu

Model:HP Pavilion Gaming

CPU: Intel i7 10th Gen

GPU: NVIDIA GTX 1660 Ti

Ram: 16 GB

• Umut Berke Hancıo ̆glu

Model:Tulpar T7 V24.1

CPU: 1th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-11800H @ 2.30GHz 2.30 GHz

GPU: NVIDIA RTX 3060

Ram: 16 GB

6 Experiments&Results, Test Phases

PortalIYTE is being prepared for just IYTE students, we must be prepared for one thousand student at the same time.

• Functionality Testing: To ensure that all functions are working as intended after the deployment stage. At least 95% of functions must work properly for acceptance.

• Usability Testing: To ensure that users can easily navigate through the website without any confusions. At least 90% percent of randomly selected users should be able to successfully register-login and should be able to create-view posts without any significant problems.

• Performance Tests:

– Stress testing: To test the performance of website under 100 person/hour traffic and 95% success rate.

– Response time testing: Response time for any loading operation should not exceed 2 second.

• Compatibility Testing: To test the compatibility of our website across 5 different browsers. The system should be able to work without any significant errors on Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera and Safari.

• Security Testing: To ensure that the encryption methods are working correctly and to ensure that private data is inaccessible for the users without the required role.