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.
The topic page. Debate is represented by a tree of expandable cards.
The details of a “Support” claim.
The interface to create a new Support.
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,
- Usability and accessibility
- Maintainability by future developers
- 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
- Leafy Wilson (Lead developer/creator of initial website)
- Mae B. Morella (Programming lead)
- Alexa Garcia (Document lead)
- Braxton Meyer (Website lead)
Docs
Project planning artifacts, required for the final submission in the Senior Project.
- 📄 Project Plan (PDF)
- 📊 Gantt Chart (PDF)
- 📑 Final Report (PDF)