Did I say side show? I meant the side projects. Some of the most fun I have had over the years in my career has been with side projects at work. Some of these projects went outside the scope of my job description, but I didn’t care because it allowed me to flex skills that maybe I didn’t get to do as much as I would like to do with my regular day-to-day job.

Pumpkins, QR Codes, and Democracy

Being close to Halloween this year, I want to make sure I get to mention one of my side projects from WCC last Halloween. I was asked if I wanted to come up with a fun interactive way for community members visiting our campus for the Annual Halloween Celebration (Trick-or-Treat Trail) to vote for student, faculty, and staff pumpkin carving/decorating. It was a fun project that I got to build out some of my favorite database tables and then write some server-side scripts (PHP) and some browser-side scripts (JavaScript) to record votes and display the real-time results. But how could I make it easy to vote? Duh! QR Codes that had unique query strings for each pumpkin. Then I used the Google chart code to display on an 85-inch Microsoft Surface hub the results that would refresh every few seconds. It was fun, I even decorated a pumpkin with a 3D-printed face.

More to Come…

Other fun side projects at WCC come to mind, but I will have to describe them later. As a preview, a couple of them were: a technology-based scavenger hunt across campus using iPads, QR codes, challenges, and SQL/PHP backed code base; and a fun but useful establishment of simple display control shortcuts on new mobile teaching stations for a new classroom technology refresh.