Introduction The SDU Webship program is divided into two parts: the first semester of the course is spent learning how to code webpages using a variety of web languages. The second semester is spent creating a website for any number of purposes; the prompt is rather open ended. The two semesters combined make up the capstone project for the participants. For our capstone project, we built a webpage for part of the Science, Discovery and the Universe website. This website would allow the SDU faculty create a virtual sign up sheet for the excursions that are required as part of SDU. What may seem like a trivial project actually turned out to be a time consuming processes involving real time server- client communication, and other advanced web programming techniques. Components The website is written in several components: a HTML backbone that provides the very basic structure of the site, Javascript that provides an easy way to code user-website interaction, and PHP, which allows the website to communicate with a database, and finally CSS, which provides the style of the website (the stuff that makes it look pretty). The overwhelming majority of the code is written in Javascript and PHP. The website is also broken up into several separate pages: one administrative page, and one student page. The layout of each page is similar in each case: there are several tabs for each page, with navigation options such as “overview” “events” “administrators” etc. This provides a nice, clean, accessible interface for users. Impact Certainly our web page will have an impact for the SDU community. The sign up system will not only save an enormous amount of time for the students and faculty, but will also make documenting and record keeping much easier. Of course, an electronic system will save the SDU office paper and ink. Academic Showcase Poster Template Cyrus F, Chris G, Bobby S, Albert W, Andrew G Science, Discovery and the Universe Data Flow The following image shows how the data “flows” in our webpage. The user inputs his login information, and based on whether he is a student or a faculty member, he is sent to two different web pages: one that allows the student to sign up for the events, and another that allows the faculty member to create the events and manage student data. From there, the student can sign up for events or the faculty can create events. This change will then be reflected in the page; either the student will get some sort of confirmation that he has signed up for an event, or the admin will see the newly added excursion added to the student page. Example Code These are two JavaScript functions that assist in loading data. The webpage that is initially loaded can be thought of as a container. To fill itself with data, the page sends a request for a specific piece of information to our server which then responds with up-to-date information that the webpage displays to the user. This asynchronous technology is useful because it provides an application-like feel to users: changes are reflected immediately. The function getData is called whenever a new version of the page's data is requested; for example, it might be called after an update to an event. The function assembles and sends its query. When the response is received, the function loads the server's data into the page. This function also decides whether to animate a change in data based on the user's settings. Also important is the function loadTab: this function listens for a request to load the entire contents of a certain tab of data, chooses the appropriate parameters, and calls getData with the proper settings. loadTab is called upon the initial loading of the site as well as whenever a change is made. Future Plans The most obvious extrapolation of this webpage is to share it with the other scholars programs; with very little extra programming, they could have a system similar to ours set up in no time. Another interesting expansion would be for the framework we laid in this project to be applied to a student manager application, where scholars students could keep track of ALL of their scholars requirements (G.P.A., courses, etc).