Whiteknights Biodiversity App (KiteSite) – Hello from Liz White

With the Whiteknights Biodiversity app project funded by the Teaching and Learning Development Fund now well underway, it’s my pleasure to introduce myself as the representative for the School of Biological Sciences on this project. This is hopefully the first installment of many, with each of us (the students) discussing our involvement with the app- now christened KiteSite.

Liz interacting with some feathered biodiversity.

Currently, I am a second year Ecology and Conservation student, so as the target audience, I’m really excited about creating the app, as it has provided a brilliant opportunity to make the extent of diversity on campus accessible to a wide range of people, so that amazing sights can be shared. I was interested in joining the project to gain experience with working with a multidisciplinary team and to improve my knowledge of the biodiversity on campus.

My role is to chat to various people about how our app could be implemented in their teaching and projects, to ensure we know which key features to include, so that the app can be useful across a broad spectrum of activities. As a target user, my job is also to test the app, so it’s intuitive, easy to access and a pleasure to use.

So far, it has been great working on the app, although collating and translating all the ideas as an ecologist to the guys in Systems Engineering has been challenging; as someone with no programming knowledge, it’s tough to know when you’re asking too much! Still, I’m looking forward to producing a program which could prove incredibly useful to the biodiversity on campus.

To download the app visit the KiteSite web site.