Enhancing User Experience for Cyberscavenger through User Interface Improvement and the Addition of a General Discussion Forum

Cyberscavenger is a map-based application created for the CyberQUEST project that allows teachers to set learning goals for the class before a field trip. Students then use Cyberscavenger to create a class report of the field trip based on the learning goals. In this project, we have improved the user interface design in several ways. Hover effect is added to enhance user experience and user interaction. Internal navigation links are added for navigation to different pages on the websites. Additionally, the color scheme of the website is changed to blue to make it more appealing. Headers and footers are added to the website to improve its look and feel. The login of the site is moved to the right. The project also enhances the search features within Cyberscavenger by adding location and teacher based search. General discussion-forum is included to enhance the sharing of information and encourage interaction amongst users of the application. The project makes use of cloud computing through Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS provides a simple way for system administrator to access servers, storage, databases and a broad set of application services over the Internet. In addition, it allows the forum related data to be stored separately from Cyberscavenger.