I Guru : Our final year project

In this post I will be describing you about my final year project : I Guru .

In this era of great competition cracking job interviews is very difficult, especially the written test which includes aptitude and verbal section. Taking this into account, me and my team decided to develop an app that could be in your Android phone and could be invaluable in such situations. This is basically an Android application that can be used by any aspiring student to practice aptitude and verbal tests online individually or in a group of two.

Coming to the technologies that we used:

Pre-Requisites:

 1) An Android ADT preferably Eclipse or Studio 

 2) NetBeans inorder to provide the environment for your jsps.

 3) A mysql GUI software. I used Toad. 

 4) Android Emulator like Bluestacks or Genymotion.

 5) Your internet browser.

The app has basically 9 sets of numerical ability module and a verbal module as well. Each user first can refer the online material provided for each module called the "Aspire" module  which comprises of important formulae and illustrations for the user to understand the concepts well before taking the assessment tests.

Coming to the "Test" module, we have used web services inorder to fetch questions from the database and also to update respective scores in the database.The test is a simple MCQ type online module comprising of a question followed by 4 possible choices. Correct answer fetches you +2 marks and incorrect ones -1. Unanswered ones fetch no marks. A countdown timer is implemented in this module that would be set to 60 seconds for each question, at the end of which the next question related to that module will be fetched automatically if the user fails to submit an answer within that alloted time. At the end of  the test, the respective scores would be updated in the database.The same changes would be reflected in the "profile" module as well as the "leaderboard".

This app also promotes the concept of comparative study by the feature of "leaderboard".The leaderboard will fetch the names and the respective scores of top 200 users of the online tests. So any user can compare his own scores with those of the rest of the users on the leaderboard. This would allow a user to assess his own level of preparation in comparison to others.

Another very important feature of our app is the "Chat" module that will allow a client user to communicate with the server inorder to solve any queries.This is implemented using a tcp program that allows real time communication between an Android emulator and the server program in our project.You can refer to this blog to learn more about tcp communication in Android programs.

Besides of these features we also implemented the "swipe gesture" feature inorder to login if a user forgets his login credentials. The "Web service" was used for several features like logging in, registering new user, fetching the leaderboard,fetching subsequent questions from the database and also to save the scores into the database from the emulator.

Many of you new to these android terms might be wondering why one must use web services. So let me tell you that creating individual intents and activities for each and every page is a tedious task. Imagine apps like Flipkart or e-bay without web service feature.What it basically does is acts as a middleware to the emulator and the mysql database. Remember that Android does not directly deal with the mysql database, unlike with SQLite. But the size of SQLite is very less therefore, I recommend you to use any Oracle database.

Also the "Text to Speech" module is implemented that converts any word or sentence typed in the edittext to Voice.We had used the English Locale here. You can refer to TutorialsPoint to learn how to change the locale.

So that is about it, as far as the project desciption is concerned. Here is the github link for my project.