Project Analysis: The Anger Management Program by The Conover Company
Our biggest application development project to date is one we did for The Conover Company, called The Anger Management Program. The Conover Company specializes in creating assessment tools for schools and businesses. The Anger Management Program focusses on assessing individuals based on personality traits, and finding positive ways to develop a healthy personality. This program was originally developed as desktop software that the user must purchase and install; however, The Conover Company decided that an Online version would be more cost efficient for customers and just as effective, while also giving them the flexibility to use the program from anywhere in the world. They came to Perception to help make it happen.
Multiple User Types
The nature of the program required us to build different functionality for administrators and managed users user types. For example, when an administrator logs in to the program, they have the ability to assign assessments and review their users’ progress. When a managed user logs in, they can view all of their assignments on a dashboard. From there, the student can navigate to different types of assignments, such as assessments, skill building activities, or e-reader review lessons.
Management System
One of the greatest features included in The Anger Management Program is the management system. It makes tracking and monitoring several users a breeze. The management system takes the burden of assigning, scoring, and reporting results off of the administrator. PDF reports of user results can also be downloaded and real-time data is tracked for all users so at any time the administrator can view up-to-date information on assessment results, completed activities, and the amount of time the user spent on a given task.
Technology Behind The Scenes
We used the CodeIgniter PHP framework to build most of the application. We have found CodeIgniter to be a well-documented and powerful framework that drastically cut down on our development time. The community behind the framework is also excellent, so we’ve done our best to open source libraries that we’ve built (http://getsparks NULL.org/packages/decorator/versions/HEAD/show) for others to use.
Other technologies we worked with that are worth mentioning include:
- jQuery (http://jquery NULL.com/) for creating interactive worksheets in the skill building units
- DOMPDF (http://code NULL.google NULL.com/p/dompdf/) for generating PDF reports
The key to success and a major selling point of The Anger Management System is the automated data tracking within the management system. It frees up so much time for the administrators to focus on more important aspects of the job, like spending quality time with students. Realistically, any company could benefit from automating a process that is currently done manually, with the help of a web application like the management system. It’s really just a matter of recognizing the opportunity and finding the right developer for the job.
