Congratulations to our Foundation Degree Software Development student Colm Canavan whose work has been profiled this week on Belfast Live.
Colm has developed ‘Derry Smart Tour’, a free app allowing tourists and local people to use the GPS on their phone to give information about local points of interest. The App also has an Augmented Reality feature that will let users point their phones camera at a place in the distance and identify it.
The local man said he chose to return to education as a mature student at NWRC after completing Maths & English GCSEs in the evening while working, and applied APEL in place of the UCAS point requirement.
He said: “NWRC was the best choice for me. I’m currently a software development student (a very mature student) at NWRC, I had already taught myself to program when I was young but never worked in software development or IT. When I was thinking about leaving my job to go back to school I thought it would be good to have more samples of work in order to improve my employability after I finish the course. I came up with the idea at that point, I thought it must already exist but while there were similar apps for other cities I was unable to find one for Derry, so I set about making it myself.”
You can watch a video of the app https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwUx_Gx7wug and you can read Colm’s story here: https://www.belfastlive.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/derry-smart-tour-app-provides-21029603