How two student organizations have harnessed the power of responsive web design.

The Department of Information Technology in the Division of Student Affairs has partnered with Fish Camp and Big Event to harness the power of responsive web design for the custom applications they support for these organizations.

The Big Event is first organization that DoIT implemented a responsive web application for. The Big Event is a one-day service project where over 17,500 students volunteer to complete community service jobs for residents in the Bryan/College Station community. Last year the Big Event completed almost 1,650 jobs. During the very short kickoff period held in the parking lot of Reed, a representative from each group assigned to a job must register/check-in, receive their tool list, and turn in waivers for participants. You can imagine the challenge of networking 20 laptops in a parking lot. Until the last few years, they used wifi hotspots for accessing the web application that supports this process. To avoid wait times and long lines, the Big Event web application was modified to be responsive. This allowed Big Event staff to use their mobile phones to walk through the lines and check-in volunteers if the check-in tables started experiencing long lines.? The student director staff can also utilize the application to monitor the number of groups who have checked in to determine when to start the welcome program and kick-off.

The next student organization that DoIT worked with to implement a responsive web application is Fish Camp, a four-day extended orientation program which kicks off in August. Over 900 students must be checked in at Reed Arena on the first day of each session. Attendees check in at designated tables for their camp color which are staffed by camp counselors, who use bar code readers to scan the participants name tags and check them into the Fish Camp Registration system. The staff and students needed a real-time count of the number of students who had checked in and how many had not. DoIT worked with the organization to make the Fish Camp Registration web application responsive. This allows the Fish Camp student leaders to utilize their mobile phones to know when to begin their welcome activities. Another benefit of making the registration application responsive was that it now allows freshmen to register for Fish Camp with mobile devices. This has been a success; a majority of registrations last year were from mobile devices.