Student Tracker (ABM2)

Student Tracker is the native Android application I built for Western Governors University’s C196 mobile-development course. The brief was a phone-based student portal that remained usable in portrait and landscape orientation while letting a student maintain the structure around a degree program.

The result is a working CRUD application for academic terms, courses, assessments and mentors. It also schedules date reminders, shares course information through other Android apps and includes sample data so the relationships can be explored without entering an entire degree plan first.

Organizing the degree plan

The data model follows the way the information is used. A term contains courses; a course carries its status, dates and notes; and assessments and mentors can be assigned to that course. List screens make each record type easy to scan, while the term and course detail screens bring their related records together.

Room provides the local database over the application’s SQLite store. Entities, DAOs and a repository separate persistence from the activities, while LiveData, view models and RecyclerView adapters keep lists and detail screens synchronized. Course statuses and assessment types are represented as enums because they are fixed choices rather than user-maintained records.

Designing for Android

The application uses native Android activities and Material components with a drawer-based home screen. View Binding connects the Java activities to reusable XML layouts, including separate landscape resources for wider phone views. The home screen and navigation drawer both expose the same four-part information architecture, so moving between record types does not require backing all the way out of a detail flow.

I also created the fictional Student identity used by the application. The interlocking blue-and-charcoal S became the launcher and splash-screen icon, and the expanded wordmark gives the otherwise utilitarian home screen a distinct product identity. Branding beyond an app icon was not part of the requirement; it was an extra design pass to make the project feel like a coherent app.

Reminders and sharing

Course start and end dates, along with assessment start and due dates, can schedule Android notifications through AlarmManager, with independent controls for each milestone.

Course notes can be shared on their own, or the app can format the course title, description, status, dates and notes into one summary. It hands that text to Android’s standard sharing intent so the student can choose email or any other compatible application rather than being locked into a single service.

What the wider layout revealed

The assignment required portrait and landscape phone support, not a dedicated tablet experience. A tablet mockup made the limitation of simply stretching an activity layout obvious: the interface remained usable, but left substantial space that could have shown a list and selected record together.

My retrospective identified a better direction for a future pass: use fragments for a master-detail tablet layout, reduce the chain of nested layout includes, finish the contextual help affordances and turn notes into a true multi-note workflow with selective sharing. It also captured a practical lesson in scope. Several quality-of-life ideas competed with the required functionality, so the finished submission ultimately focused on a complete, testable minimum viable product.

The archive preserves the Android Studio project, final release APK, flow and layout mockups, build screenshots and the project reflection. The public repository contains the source for the application itself.