About a year after a student-developed application was first made, it is being put to the test on study abroad trips.
The Traveler, a free Android app, enables users to track and add descriptions to where they took photos. The app was developed by Kyle Parker, senior software engineer for Developing Technologies.
The Traveler is a digital sketchbook and trip journal, Parker said, built and designed with students in mind. As students travel, the app uses Google Maps to follow their path, showing them where they were at any point in the day.
“As [students] walked, they could drop markers [on the map], and those markers would be photos, videos, sketches, audio notes or just any type of media they would be able to see on the map where that particular thing was captured,” Parker said. “So, it gave some context to the trip. You have a location where this photo was taken, you have a description of what that photo is, so it’s more than just a picture.
“It gives them sort of a seamless collection on the device of all the trip assets that they might have, so when they come back from the trip they have this collection.”
Sophomore pre-veterinary medicine and zoology major Natasha Rollings and sophomore telecommunications major Sam Noble went on a trip to Italy over the summer and used the app to track their daily progress.
“At the end of the day when I would go to write my journal, I would look back at a whole map of Rome or Florence, and I could see that I covered a quarter of Rome in a day, or I could see where exactly I was throughout the week,” Rollings said. “We could look back and see what exactly we did throughout the day, and it just kind of helped add more memories to the trip.”
Noble said it was helpful when he wanted to see where he had walked to previously on the trip.
“It was most useful later in the week when I had free time, and I wanted to go back to something we had walked to earlier in the week, and I couldn’t quite remember how to get there or wanted to see if there was a different way we could take,” he said. “When we were walking, I could start the app and say ‘record my path’ and just leave it in my backpack and that would record the entire day for me if I didn’t do anything else.”
The app was featured at the yearly Google I/O conference — one of 20 apps at the conference — and Google picked it up to feature in their Google Play store.
“It went worldwide,” Parker said. “It was more than just Ball State students. It had about 80,000 downloads across 190 countries. It was really not expected.”
