HERA Search

HERA is the Hawai‘i Educational Research Association, a group to provide a medium in which education researchers, teachers, and administrators can share findings and discuss issues in a cumulative effort to improve current educational practices. Among other things, HERA holds an annual conference in which members may showcase recent publications.

Given access to the database, I modernized the database from the very outdated Filemaker 7 to the maintained cloud-based Google Sheets. Using Googleʻs Visualization API Query Language, I was able to modernize the search engine to search the Google Sheet and pull values from it. Database usage is now exponentially simpler, since it only requires that the user knows how to use Google Sheets. A cloud-based database makes it extremely versatile, allowing access from virtually anywhere.

Using Google Forms, members can easily submit their proceedings for the conference in a clean form that will automatically be submitted into the database to await approval. Also, the search form and results pages were redesigned, making them simpler and mobile-friendly.