Introducing the Medford Walking Tour App

Hi readers 👋 , we are Rebecca Alpert, Monsurat Olaosebikan, and Anna Kasagawa. 3 students at Tufts University taking Ming Chow’s Mobile Development course in Fall 2017. In this post we’ll be introducing our semester long project — developing a bike tour app for the Medford Historical Society!

Goal

Students at Tufts and their visiting families aren’t very familiar with local history or Medford (even though it’s so close)! We want to create an app that will leads students and parents on a historical walking tour to/from the Medford Historical Society in Medford Square. Locals who are interested in Medford history will also have an opportunity to learn more as well.

Target Audience

Our target audience is Tufts students, student’s families, Medford residents, visitors interested in history, and people in the neighborhood who enjoy a nice walk or bike ride.

Stakeholders

Kyna Hamill at the Medford Historical Society will be supporting the app. She is a longtime, senior volunteer (the historical society is run by volunteers). She suggested the idea for the app and gave us information on historical sites, and potential audiences. After the course, the code will be made available for use/maintenance by the Medford Historical Society.

We will also reach out to the Tufts Digital Collections and Archives, which has a lot of information on the history of Tufts buildings/grounds. Kyna Hamill pointed us to their online Concise Encyclopedia of Tufts History. This will allow us to flesh out the Tufts-specific portions of the tour.

Tufts junior, Evan Cook, said that he only knows of one historical building around Tufts. He expressed interest in learning more about the neighborhood around our campus.

Core Functionality

• Find user’s location using geolocation
• Display a walking tour of about 10 historical sites from their location to Tufts campus or Medford Historical Society (tour can start at either location)
• Turn by turn directions to each historical site using Mapbox
• Narration, images, and text description of each historical site description shown upon arrival at the site

Secondary Functionality

• Scavenger hunt at the various locations
• Bike route
• Potentially additional sites
• CMS for adding sites/updating audio and visuals

Mobile Device Features We Will Use

• GPS
• Speakers
• Internet

Limitations

• We’re new to app development
• Audio narration needs to be recorded (the historical society does not have any)
• There’s a lot of research about the history we need to do before we can finalize the app
• We need to map out the final route
• Google Maps does not allow using their API for navigation purposes as per their terms of service, so we will need to use Mapbox. It’s more feasible to work with Mapbox using Android Studio, unfortunately, so we will not be able to use React Native as we originally planned.