Instructions for the Research Paper:

The body of your research paper must be a maximum of 10 pages, including a separate title page and abstract (10 pages of actual paper text).

References, tables or figures, and appendices are outside the 10 page limit.

You are required to comply with APA, 6th ed., rules and style in this final project. The paper must be typed in 12 point font, double spaced, on 8 ½ by 11 in. paper.

Please use two spaces after a period, format section headers properly, use correct formats for lists, figures, and diagrams, and construct citations and references list entries properly.

Please structure your final project/research paper including:

1. What is your research area, the motivation of research, and how important is it for the industry practice/knowledge advancement?

2. Problem statement provides a clear and concise description of the issues that need to be addressed - What is the specific problem in that research area that you will address (e.g. lack of understanding of a subject, low performance ...)?

3. Objectives provide a list of goals that will be achieved through the proposed research - What are the benefits/impact (e.g. better understanding, improved productivity ...) that will be generated if the research problem is answered?

4. Preliminary literature review: provide a summary of previous related research on the research problem and their strength and weakness and a justification of your research - What is known/what have been done by others? And, why your research is still necessary?

5. Define the research methods and/or logic steps - What to do and how to solve the problem and achieve proposed objectives?

6. Describe the outcome of your study, including figures from your models, data or simulations. Summarize your results, interpret them, note any drawbacks or flaws that you discovered in your study design, suggest potential resolutions or possible follow-up studies.

7. All factual material that is not original with you must be accompanied by a reference to its source. Please use APA guideline on reference and citation style.

Abstract:

The main mission of the project is to design a computerized database system that will manage bookings for hostel for College. This will replace the current manual system that involves booking through manual process requiring the student to be presented at the time of booking. The new system will be expected to;

a) Allow online booking
b) Reduce the time taken to book a hostel
c) To ensure that the first-come-first serve policy is applied effectively
d) To reduce the redundancy of data
e) Computerize the inventory of hostels
f) Enable easy querying of unallocated beds

A student booking needs first to present a bank slip to the accounts office to confirm payment of fees and then given a receipt of fees payment. Then the student proceeds to the accommodation department office and presents the receipt to the house keeper where the booking is allowed if the student at least has paid the tuition fee.

The beds information is pre-filled first in the formation of the file in order to avoid duplicates. Then when a student books, the bed booked is identified and ticked. Then the details of the student are entered across the row of the bed.

Booking is usually done before the beginning of the semester. When the student comes to start a new semester, he or she goes to the accommodation office to be allocated a mattress and a hostel key. This is viable only when the student has completed fees with accommodation fee inclusive.

There exists an opportunity of adding an inventory of hostels defaults such as broken beds, power switches and lost keys among others which may prompt the house keeper to effect the repairing of the default before allocating the hostels.

Also there exists an opportunity to introduce an online booking systems where the students can change their booking status online through login procedures.

Tasks may be distributed easily to the finance department. Instead of the students carrying the fees receipt to the housekeeper after attending to the finance office, there should be a file that records all the students who have paid fees and are residents. This file should be instead taken to the accommodation office as a reference of the students requiring accommodation.