Look at the Chapter Case Keeping Track of Your Geocaching Outings at the end of the chapter and complete the Day 1: activity.

Keeping Track of Your Geocaching Outings

When Wayne Johansen turned 16, his dad bought him a new Garmin handheld GPS system. His family had always enjoyed camping and hiking, and Wayne was usually the one who monitored their hikes with his dads GPS system. He always liked to carry the GPS to monitor the routes, distances, and altitudes of their hikes. More recently, though, he had found a new hobby using his GPS system: geocaching.

Geocaching is a high-tech version of the treasure hunts that most of us did when we were kids. Participants search for geocaches or caches that are small, hidden, waterproof containers that typically contain a logbook and perhaps a small item. When found, the participant sometimes gets instructions for the next moveto either enter information into a logbook or to look for the next cache.

As Wayne became more involved with his hobby, he discovered that there are many different kinds of activities for geocaching enthusiasts. The simplest ones are those that involve caches found by using GPS coordinates, although even some of these tasks can be difficult if the caches are well hidden. Some of the activities involve multipoint drops where there is a set of clues in multiple locations that must be followed to arrive at the final cache point. Some activities involve puzzles that must be solved to determine the coordinates of the final cache.

Before long, Wayne wanted to make his own caches and post them for people to find. He discovered that there were several Web sites with access to geocaching information, caches, and memberships. He joined one of the geocaching Web sites and used it to log his finds. But he decided he would like to create his own system for tracking all the information he had about his caches. Conveniently, Waynes older brother Nick, a college student majoring in information systems, was looking for a semester project for one of his programming classes. The two of them decided to develop a system to help Wayne keep track of all his geocaching activities.

In this end-of-chapter case, you will go through the various core processes of an SDLC and perform some of the activities of a development project. The project is divided into days, as was our Tradeshow System project. The daily assignments for this case should be considered as preliminary efforts and rough drafts. The objective of these assignments is to help you remember the overall approach to software development. Several assignments have been listed for each day to allow your instructor to select those that best meet the objectives of the course.

Hint: You can look at the System Vision Document RMO Tradeshow System (Fig 1-8, Chapter 1) to see and example of a System Vision Document.

Assignment D0-1: Write a rough draft of the System Vision document based on your brainstorming ideas. Research geocaching and relate it to the described case in your book. [Hint: Think of what Wayne wants the system to do and why this is a benefit to him]. Write complete grammatically correct sentences.

Purpose of the assignment: Relate the Systems Analysis concepts that we learnt in the Overview of Systems Analysis and start thinking like a System Analyst.