Mobile Web Application Development, Portfolio Assessment, UEL, UK

1. What is the assessment?

The Mobile Web Application Development (MWAD) module is assessed through a portfolio submission, which students are required to submit during the Fall Semester of 2024-2025 at the University of West London. This portfolio assessment involves evaluating a student’s competence through a collection of work, including a report, programming code, wireframes, and reflection of the software development process. As part of the assessment, students should develop seven different mobile applications, all to be created as native Android apps. To showcase their work, students must submit both a written report and a presentation video that outlines the development process of these seven applications.

Each application is detailed in the following sections, along with supplementary documents to guide students on how the applications should function. For each app, students must create and submit wireframes to demonstrate pre-development planning and compare these to the final versions to highlight front-end progress. Additionally, the video component should showcase the event-driven functionalities of the apps, developed in either Java or Kotlin.

Students are required to submit a report (with a format provided in the next section) and a video that reflects their development process. The video should not only demonstrate the functionality of the applications but also discuss challenges encountered, existing bugs, potential errors or missing features, as well as an overall reflection on the design and development process. Only one report and one video submission are allowed.

The next two sections cover the specific requirements for the report and the video.

2. What does the report should include?

As mentioned earlier, students are required to submit a report that consists of several sections. This report must be uploaded to Turnitin as a PDF file. Please avoid submitting a Word document, as this can often lead to changes in formatting and structure. The report is divided into nine sections, which correspond to the chapter titles that should be included. Some chapters, such as Reflection and Discussion, contain subheadings, meaning the content should be further divided and discussed in detail.
 
2.1. Cover page: 
This section should include student name, surname, id, course, module name, module leader (i.e., Dr. Cain Kazimoglu) and your video component link.

The link to the video component (e.g., the video presentation link) must be placed on the cover page and nowhere else. Please note that each student should submit only one video link, which must be publicly accessible to the marker(s) of the module. Do not provide separate links for each app; all applications, along with your development and reflection process, should be explained in a single video. If the video is not publicly accessible or cannot be accessed by the marker(s) at the time of grading, you will not be contacted, and it will be assumed that no video component has been submitted.

2.2. Introduction: 
this section should briefly discuss whether you have successfully achieved and developed all of the applications. If there are any errors, absent parts, applications you were not able to finish or any other business - you need to mention these in this section. Please be upfront and honest, inform your marker on what you managed to accomplish, and what was not done or have errors/absent parts in your work. Additionally, if you sought to go above and beyond, clearly highlight in which applications you did this and what enhancements were implemented.

2.3. Wireframes and User Experience:
This section should focus on wireframes and the user interface of your applications. While guidance is given to you in each application regarding how the apps should work – these guidelines are not set in stone. As an example, you can change the theme of an application or completely use different pictures or even a completely different layout. As an example, in application 3, you are asked to complete a Pizza order app, however, this can be changed to “make your own bowl” app with an Asian cuisine theme. The theme of an application can be changed, and you are highly encouraged to do so in order to avoid high similarity in your report.

Before you start developing the applications, you will need to do some pre-development planning. The first step in designing applications is to decide what the user interface (UI) should be and how it will function. To create the UI of applications, you will first need to do the wireframes – which are simple, low-fidelity visual representations of an app's layout, focusing on structure and functionality without detailing design elements. Wireframes are used to map out the user interface and user experience before diving into the full design process. Therefore, with each application, you will need to complete one or more wireframes as these are your pre-development planning of the apps.

Once wireframe(s) are done, you are responsible for creating the UI. The apps are finished, you compare these to the final version of your user experience. The comparison of this, and the final version of your application should be displayed and discussed in this section. You need to use a wireframe tool to draw your wireframes, and some of the popular choices are Figma, Balsamiq, Miro, JustInMind and many more!
Some applications require verification or validation of input data. If this is the case, you can display how you planned and implemented this both in wireframes and in the user interface of the application. Please bear in mind that this section should not include any code such as front-end/user interface code (i.e. XML code). Provided wireframes and the developed user interface should be labeled as figures and be discussed in this section, and you do not need to provide any code – only the wireframes and the UI of your app. In other words, XML code of the apps is not needed in your report submission.

2.4.  Back End development:
this section should include critical sections of your Kotlin/Java code. Please do not discuss every line of code in this section but rather focus on the parts that were challenging for you and/or difficult to overcome during the development. The quality of the work you present in this section is more important than the quantity. Therefore, instead of discussing each activity or class you implemented, discuss how you improved your code to overcome the challenges you have faced, what decisions were taken, what was the original code? What did you end up writing to fix the errors and how this can contribute your skillsets that are potentially useful and valuable in mobile development. If you did not overcome a certain bug, and this created several problems for you, this is also a good section to mention.

2.5. AI and CoPilot tools used: 
This assessment allows you to use ChatGPT and other AI software development tools such as CoPilot, Blackbox AI or Google Gemini – which is now integrated as part of Android Studio. If you had used any of these tools in this assessment, this section should clearly indicate which Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools are used and in what area – e.g. front-end and back-end. If you used AI tools in the development of multiple native application, these should be discussed individually for each application developed.

A very bad practice often repeated by students is to simply say “I used ChatGPT to create the recyclerView activity class in exercise 6”. Instead, explain why you needed to use this, how did it help you, and what enhancements you added on the top of the ChatGPT code. Another bad practice is simply copying and pasting the code generated by ChatGPT and not doing any modifications on the code. Please be aware that it is possible for academicians to detect AI generated code, and this usually increases your similarity in the report. Therefore, make sure to be very clear and upfront about how you used these tools and what sort of modifications were made on the top of the AI generated code.

2.6. Reflection & Discussion:
what was planned, what was done right or wrong in this assessment? Bugs, Errors in your code/apps should be mentioned in this section very clearly. What did you learn throughout this assessment?

Reflect to your experience both in terms of front and back-end development. This is a section student usually struggle to write or keep very short and lose a lot of marks. Therefore, use the following headings and discuss each with at least 5 sentences.

6.1. The completion of the work
Discuss if you managed to complete all of the applications. Are there any missing parts? If so, please highlight these: what is exactly missing and why?

6.2.  A list of bugs
In software development, bugs usually emerge during the run time when applications attempt to run or trigger an event base action. Do you have any bugs in your applications? Did you manage to fix these bugs, or do they still exist? Please discuss these by providing application alias (e.g. in Pizza ordering app).

6.3. Above and Beyond
Did you go above and beyond and implement innovations to enhance your applications. An innovation is not a simple gimmick but rather a disruptive approach you might have applied on the top of the given requirements. As an example, you do not need to use Firebase for Application 7, but if you do, this is counted as going above and beyond.

6.4. Self-Critical Evaluation
Evaluate yourself, the portfolio assessment in general. Did you manage yourself well in this assessment? Did you manage to develop all of the apps? Was the module useful to you? Whether you write negative or positive comments, you will get full marks in this section so long as you are constructive and honest.

2.7. Conclusion:
Do you think this was a successful work of yours? Did you get any external help? Speak your mind freely and be critical of yourself. You can also mention/recognise your module leader here if you believe the work given is aligned with industrial level software development. If you have to do this assessment all over again, what would you change or do? Finally, do you plan to enhance your work? If so, please discuss the future work in this section.

2.8. References:
resource you used and cited in your report should be listed as a reference in this section with Harvard style (click the link if you do not know how to reference in Harvard style). Please be aware that just because you are allowed to use resources (e.g., YouTube videos, CHATGPT), and show references, it does not mean that you did not commit plagiarism if your similarity check is very high. This is explained in detail down below.