Mobile Application for Student Handbook Based on the Android Operating System

Abstract

This paper presents the design and implementation of the mobile student handbook for the Department of Computer and Communications Engineering (DCCE), Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University (ATBU). The book was aimed at providing students with specific information for the curriculum of the department that indicates their structures as given by the Minimum Academic Standard of the National Universities Commission (NUC-MAS) Nigeria. It provides information on the brief history of the department, entry requirement, grading system, graduation requirements among many. The Conventional student handbook is a hard copy that is not easy to carry alone all the time, hard to manage, prone to damage, and easy to being misplaced. To address this setback, a software application of a student handbook is developed using Android SDK. This will help to provide an easy-to-use, interactive, and portable means for simple access to the department’s curriculum structure that will assist students during their academic pursuits. The user evaluation process was employed to validate the application, this involved installations of the application to the mobile phone of 100 students and 20 staff. Results were recorded and shown in both graphs and tabular format. This application provides basic features of the DCCE’s curriculum like the courses and their pre-requisites for all levels, grading system, degree nomenclature, graduation requirements, and examination guidelines, etc. Moreover, it is an all-in-one offline mobile application that was meant to resolve basic issues. In the future, the link to the university website should be incorporated for further access to information.