Eli Williams, Brian Kemle, David Tollett, and Katie Weaver
Four students at the University of Alabama in Huntsville’s College of Business are collaborating on a dashboard that reports COVID-19 statistics.
Katie Weaver, David Tollett, Eli Williams and Bryan Kemle are the students who are continuing their work on a COVID-19 dashboard. The dashboard tracks various pieces of data about COVID-19 throughout the world, including confirmed cases, deaths, recoveries, active cases and fatality rates, and this information can be sorted by country, state and county level. Additionally, the dashboard allows users to select specific dates and date ranges to look at all of the aforementioned data. In its current state, the dashboard updates its information once a day.
This project required the students to create a user interface with two “ends,” and they decided to split this work in half; Williams and Tollett are responsible for maintaining the back end, and Weaver and Kemle are responsible for the front end. The back end collects data and formats it appropriately while the front end ensures the data is organized and presented clearly.
Both the front and back ends require different softwares, so the group spent most of its initial efforts testing different softwares to find the most ideal ones for the project. Every time the students used a different software they had to learn how to operate it, which made creating the dashboard a lengthy process. Currently, the front end team uses Power BI to host the dashboard which allows the information collected by the back end team to be displayed on a website. The back end team programmed and ran different scripts to gather the information needed for the dashboard. Describing what the back end team did, Williams said, “We simply got our data from a GitHub repository that’s … run by John Hopkins University, and then we just took that data and I wrote a Python script and just inserted all of it into our database hosted by Amazon AWS (Amazon Web Server).”
The students began working on the dashboard in January 2022. They took the Information Systems 210 course in the College of Business, and as the only computer science majors in the class, their professor, Mr. Chakri Deverapalli, presented them with a problem–COVID-19 trackers stopped updating information–and asked them if they wanted to try to solve it. The students were free to choose how to solve the problem, and the only requirement was that their project had to have a display of some sort.
The four students agreed that this is the most complex project they have worked on, so when they started, they faced several challenges. Reflecting on their experience, Williams said, “As computer science majors, we do a lot more like, lower level stuff. We hadn’t built like, data websites or databases … this was a really big learning curve for us, but we were able to figure it out piece by piece, it just took a while, definitely took a lot of trial and error.”
Despite the progress they have made, the students still have plans for their project. One aspect they hope to enhance is the information they gather; they hope to utilize multiple reliable sources to gather the information the dashboard needs. Although their software is programmed to report COVID-19 recoveries, for example, the sole source they are using, John Hopkins University, no longer reports this statistic, so the group wants to find more sources to cover missing information. Currently, the dashboard is only accessible on Kemle’s Power BI account, so another major priority for the students is to make the dashboard public.
The students would like to brand their dashboard as a product of UAH, but have not fully planned out how to make it official. They are currently collaborating with Mr. Deverapalli, who has encouraged them to work toward publishing their dashboard under a UAH domain.
