A friendlier interface for a shared physics equipment database

The physics departments at Carleton and St. Olaf share a database of lab equipment and demonstrations. Faculty need to browse and search it, and lab managers need to enter new equipment easily. The DataSquad designed a web and desktop interface for it in FileMaker, starting by learning relational database basics, since improving the interface meant changing how the database is structured.

A later subtask was to help the student worker who photographs equipment and uploads the photos. Yihuang Wu and a teammate interviewed the student who built the database, spoke with the physics lab manager about the photo requirements, and examined sample equipment. They then worked out how much server space each photo could use and wrote image-optimization instructions to stay within it.