You no longer have an excuse to sleep through class, forget to buy textbooks or go to the wrong classroom — that is, if you have a cell phone.

Jason Maners and Mike Vysocka of the Info Tech and Engineering Computer Services have developed a mobile application, go.ncsu.edu / myschedule , that shows students the location of thir classes on Google maps.

“This application takes the schedule of a student from Information Records with details about the building where the classes are…[and] maps that information to the Google Maps application on their phone,” Maners said. “If a device doesn’t have a Google Maps application, then this app opens a global Google maps web page.”

The application is not limited to information about classes, as explained by Vysocka .

“One of the other features that this app provides…it also gives the information about your instructor… their phone and email address,” Vysocka said.

However, there are certain limitations of this application that might be very difficult to overcome. This application just puts a marker on the building where you need to go to, but does not show the exact location of the class in that building.

“…So if your class is in the corner of the Daniels Hall near the front door and if you enter through the back door, you might have to walk all the way around the building to get to your class,” Vysocka said.

Vysocka said another disadvantage is the app is dependent on student information from Registration and Records that comes in every morning.

“So if you dropped a class now, you will have to wait till tomorrow morning for your mobile application to be refreshed,” Vysocka said.

Besides trying to make this application a real-time thing, Maners and Vysocka are also planning to include a lot of new features in this existing application within the next few months.

“We are hoping that by the end of the semester we may be able to provide to the students their Final Grade Data,” Maners said. “So, if you were to come back to the application in December, you would see that the final grades have been submitted.”

The development team is also considering providing a quick link from the app page to drop courses, according to Vysocka .

“If you don’t like a course, you can drop it right then on your phone and that feed goes back immediately in the pool and somebody in the wait list can get it,” Vysocka said. “Whereas right now, the folks are waiting till the end of the day to drop the course… [that is] after they reach their dorms”.

The app team developed this project in the very small time period of four weeks, and one that will greatly benefit the new students who have little knowledge about the campus.

“This is an exciting application and a great example of the new technology that is available to our students,” Leslie Dare, director of the Student Affairs Technology Services, said.