Grand Emporium of the West Tablet App

FAIN: HC-50019-13

Washington State University Vancouver (Vancouver, WA 98686-9600)
Brett Oppegaard (Project Director: October 2012 to May 2014)

Development of a mobile computer application designed specifically for Sixth through Eighth graders for the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, the most popular historical attraction in the Pacific Northwest. The current Fort Vancouver Mobile project features a mobile app designed for smartphones that allows visitors to the site to experience interactive media, including video and animation, as well as contextual digital materials delivered to users at optimal places at optimal times, based on location-awareness technologies. With this grant, we would redesign the application's focus to create a tablet computer interface for this project and remove the location-specific elements of the design as a way to reach a broader audience and to provide an educational app useful to teachers and students not able to travel to the Fort Vancouver site, near Portland, Ore. This tablet app, titled the "Grand Emporium of the West," as Fort Vancouver was known, would be featured by EDSITEment, as part of the Verizon-EDSITEment collaboration on mobile apps with humanities content.