Students make Web page for Katrina victims
The six students of a senior level Internet applications course at Chadron State College have created a model Web site to help the beleaguered economy of the region struck by Hurricane Katrina.
The students demonstrated their completed semester-long project during a noon presentation at CSC’s Math and Science Building on Friday. Their creation allows employers to post open positions and job seekers to search openings by their specific region and type.
Their instructor, Greg Spranger, who is completing his first semester as professor of information science and technology at CSC, said the work resembles that of highly paid specialists in the field.
“People get paid $50,000, $70,000 or $100,000 per year to complete this kind of work, and these students did it as a class project in four months,” he said.
The students who worked on the project are Kiel Cary of Chadron, Don Cestnik of Rock Springs, Wyo., Dustin Griesman of Columbus, Lacey Umble Gulbranson of Mitchell, Scott Hoffman of Casper, Wyo., and Joshua Keith of Chadron.
Spranger asked the students to take on a community service project at the beginning of the semester. While projects such as a classified advertising site for CSC students and a student dating site were proposed, the enormity of the disastrous hurricane’s effects outweighed other suggestions.
Although the site is not yet live, Spranger said the students will try to get it published soon.
“With a couple hours of revising code, we could make this site work for any job searching application anywhere,” Gulbranson said. “Hopefully it’s going to be used somewhere, because we put too much time into this for it not to be.”
The site has a number of complicated features found on advanced Web sites, such as password protection, e-mails upon registration and information dynamically generated from a data source. The students also created a “vulgarity filter” for the site to keep employers from posting profanity.
Category: Campus News