2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Approximately two years ago, three students developed an app under the guidance of a faculty mentor. The goal of this app was to digitize the school’s Red Folder in an effort to raise awareness of on campus resources for students experiencing a mental health crisis with students, faculty, and staff. The app was designed to work natively with both iOS and Android devices. Prior to the start of the Fall 2021 semester, the app was deployed to both the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store as a free download for students, faculty, and staff. The app was well received by the campus community. The school newspaper was also interested in the app as well prompting an article from the student run newspaper to be written and published. This paper seeks to examine what has happened in terms of app adoption on campus over the past two years.
This paper will begin by restating the initial problem as well as the background research and materials and methods used to complete the app development. The app design will also be discussed. Once this is done, there will be a discussion of the advertising done in the first year and the resulting number of downloads. Afterwards, the advertising and resulting downloads for the second year will be examined. Following this, the discussion will analyze the results from the first two years. The paper will look at the successes and failures as well as the lessons learned from the past two years and what the strategy is moving forward.