USP Campus Map App for New Students and Visitors

Abstract

New students or freshmen joining universities and large campuses face huge difficulties and problems in locating and navigating to their lecture/tutorial rooms and labs. While they already face challenges in securing courses, textbooks and accommodation, they also have to adopt their new learning environment and know their way around. The University of the South Pacific is a premier institute of high education for the Pacific region and has membership of 12 island countries. Therefore, there are students comin g to the main campus - Laucala Campus in Fiji from a diverse background in the Pacific and beyond . The First Year Experience s urveys have revealed that students miss some of their classes in the first few weeks as they are unable to locate their lecture an d tutorial rooms given the spread of the rooms on campus. Consequently , many freshmen also miss mandatory formative assessments. This is one of the main reasons for developing the USP Campus Map app. Then , there is also documentation on the discomfort to v isitors and guests of the University due to the difficulty in finding places in a timely manner. The USP Campus Map App is an intuitive tool designed to assist students and the visitors to find their desired places in the campus such as Library, Book Cent re, Lecture rooms, Cafeterias, ITS labs, Conference rooms, Student Academic Service building and many more. It also marks the w ashrooms , c afeteria , s ecurity booth and other common places. The Campus Map app contains the navigation system that will allow th e students and visitors to reach their selected destination easily. The routes that the app provide movement on foot as well as by car. The building information contains the building number, images and description about that building. The app operates offl ine after the first download. This paper discusses the design, development and deployment of the app and feedback from the users. // Paper ID 249