Project Outline

In the past few years there has been an industry-wide trend towards Facebook integration. It can even be seen on WPI’s JobFinder website. Essentially, the goal is to let users of your website engage with it through facebook. Apps can deliver alerts and news stories to users. Facebook also provides access to many other core features via API. Some examples are sending requests, awarding achievements, and creating events. It also gives apps their own page on Facebook’s site, where they can fill a ‘canvas’ which covers most of the page with anything they want.

We plan to build a facebook application that will accomplish these functions:

1. handle authentication:
1. Our application will allow users to associate their Facebook account with their Assistments account using the OAUTH 2.0 protocol.
2. It will also request any necessary permissions from the user.
2. manage notifications
1. When an event, such as a problem set being assigned, occurs, the application will generate a notification of some type.
2. When a user arrives at our app via a notification, we can redirect the user to the relevant page.
3. It will also provide the infrastructure necessary to integrate Assistments further with facebook. For example, awarding achievements to users will be as simple as a single post request.

This will be beneficial to students using Assistments because many younger children use facebook. With our application, assistments will be immediately visible to students in a place they already go. We hope that if we increase the convenience of using assistments, students will be more likely to do their assignments.