Mobile-Application for Digitizing Paper Receipts for the Honors Human Event (“Tutory”)

All freshman honors students are required to take a two-semester course during their freshman year at ASU called Human Event. This course focuses on developing a student’s ability to break down the concepts in important historical texts and then write essay’s that explore these concepts. One of the unique qualities of the honors college at ASU Polytechnic is the Thesis Fest, which is an opportunity for students to share their progress when writing each essay before the due date. During Thesis Fest, students discuss the texts they are writing about with tutors and they get helpful pointers regarding how to clearly understand the concepts they want to explore. These tutors are previous Human Event students who are all enrolled in another course called the Honors Colloquium. The polytechnic campus is also unique because it allows a student’s paper to be evaluated in a conference – Paper Mini-Conference (PMC) – between the student, a tutor, and the professor. The inspiration for this project is derived from personal experiences in the Honors Colloquium. During each Thesis Fest, students and tutors are required to fill out tutor receipts, verifying that the student attended Thesis Fest as well as the texts discussed. In addition, a receipt is also used to verify that the tutor is fulfilling his/her tutoring obligations. Therein lies a pain point for both tutors and students, which is the fact that all receipts are hand-written on small pieces of paper and both the tutor and student must have separate duplicate copies. In addition, the head tutor of the Colloquium is then required to analyze the cards and verify that individual tutors have enough receipts for the semester. Lastly, the student must verify that they attended Thesis Fest by bringing a receipt to the PMC. There have been many occasions when a student has forgotten their receipt, which results in them having to email the receipt to the professor or bring it in at a later time. This project aims to solve this problem by building a mobile application that digitizes the data collection for receipts.