Youniversity: Smart Campus Reporting System

What it does

Youniversity simplifies campus reporting with a dual system. A mobile app lets users report damage with geolocated photos. A web dashboard allows managers to track, locate, and update reports for efficient maintenance, keeping a seamless communication channel.

Your inspiration

The idea for Youniversity sparked from a single observation: a student in a wheelchair forced to detour around a broken automatic door. This resonated with our team's shared experiences of encountering damaged infrastructure with no clear way to report it. We learned this frustration was twofold: students felt their voices were lost, breeding apathy, while facility managers struggled with vague, unactionable reports that delayed crucial fixes. We were driven to create a unified system that empowers users to report easily and equips managers to act efficiently, ensuring a safer, better-maintained campus for all.

How it works

Youniversity is a dual-platform system: a mobile app for user reporting and a web dashboard for facilities management, linked by a real-time Firebase database. A user reports an issue via the mobile app by uploading up to three geotagged photos, pinning the precise location, selecting a category, and adding an optional description. For community engagement and awareness, submitted reports populate a live campus map showing potential hazards, while a leaderboard incentivizes participation. All submitted data syncs instantly to the management web dashboard. Here, staff can efficiently filter reports by status (e.g., Submitted, In Progress, Completed), category, or date to prioritize repairs. Crucially, when a manager updates a report’s status, the system sends a push notification to the user. This closes the feedback loop, confirming their contribution led to tangible action and fostering a transparent maintenance process.

Design process

Our development process was rooted in user-centered design, beginning with identifying our two key stakeholders: campus community members and facility managers. Through semi-structured interviews, we uncovered critical pain points. We found users were unaware of reporting channels, ignored minor damage, and distrusted that reports would be actioned. Managers confirmed that the low number of reports, coming mostly from faculty via phone calls, lacked actionable details like photos or locations and were frequently misdirected to the wrong department, causing delays. These insights directly fueled the design of Youniversity as a unified, dual-platform system. The mobile app was designed as a single, intuitive reporting funnel for users, while the web dashboard empowers managers by receiving detailed, categorized reports that can be delegated efficiently. We progressed from paper concepts to high-fidelity prototypes in Figma, refining the user experience based on feedback. To build our functional beta, we accelerated development using GenAI tools (ChatGPT, Gemini) for code scaffolding. The native Android app was built with Kotlin, the web dashboard with React, and the system is powered by Firebase (Database & Storage) and the Google Maps API.

How it is different

Most reporting systems are passive tools that fail for one simple reason: user apathy. They provide a channel to report an issue, but offer no real incentive for users to participate. Youniversity’s originality lies in its design as an active engagement ecosystem that directly tackles motivation. We integrate extrinsic motivators tied to campus culture to foster a sense of shared ownership. Users earn collectible badges featuring the university mascot for their contributions, and a live leaderboard with semester-end rewards creates friendly competition. This social computing approach transforms infrastructure reporting from a solitary chore into a collaborative and rewarding community activity. While other solutions are merely functional, Youniversity is inherently social and motivational. It doesn’t just provide a tool; it builds a self-sustaining culture of participation to ensure a safer, more responsive campus for all.

Future plans

Our immediate next step is a pilot program at Yonsei University to validate our system in a real-world environment. A primary objective of this pilot is to gather a robust dataset to train a machine learning model. This AI classifier will automatically analyze and route reports to the correct maintenance department, removing the burden of categorization from users and streamlining the process for managers. Concurrently, we plan to enhance the user experience by developing features like geospatial clustering and the stacking of duplicate reports on the map, providing clearer insights and a more intuitive interface for all community members.

Awards

Awarded “Teacher’s Pick(1st Place)” during the “Techno-Art Capstone Project” class of Underwood International College, Yonsei University of Spring 2025.