A collaborative web app for philosophical debate|

About

Hello! This website documents our Fall 2022 Senior Project. If you’re a student looking to use the Vada Project website, go to https://vadaproject.com. Ciao!

Introduction

The Vāda Project is a PHP+SQL web application that teaches pramāṇa-vāda, a classic style of philosophical debate developed in ancient India and used for over a millennium.

This debate format is designed to promote critical thought and reflection through its logical structure of theses and counter.

This semester-long project was undertaken as a collaboration between students and faculty within the College of Computing and KSU philosophy department.

Developers acquired the philosophy department’s legacy codebase, refactored, tested, and redesigned the frontend and backend, to deliver a well-documented and useable interactive platform for epistemological discussion.

Screenshots

The homepage, containing the topics list and group code interface. homepage.png

The topic page. Debate is represented by a tree of expandable cards. topic.png

The details of a “Support” claim. inference.png

The interface to create a new Support. supportform.png

Methods

Through weekly meetings with end-users, and closely following the software development life cycle, a team of student developers delivered a codebase which emphasizes,

  1. Usability and accessibility
  2. Maintainability by future developers
  3. Adherence to high-quality code standards

Developers applied industry best-practices (user centered design, version-control, testing, and continuous integration) to discover and meet all requirements.

Version Control

To enable present and future collaboration, developers closely used a GitHub repository to track changes. Code is deployed live from this repository to the production site. GitHub Actions perform automated code quality tests.

Results

Students and staff in the philosophy department responded very positively to UI changes, and overall code quality increased. The project is actively being used as a teaching tool. Introducing students to non-western philosophy. This project will continue on to aid philosophy students that will go into law school, legal advising, and other technical positions.

Team

Photo taken at C-day showing the posterboard and four developers.

Docs

Project planning artifacts, required for the final submission in the Senior Project.