History is just a click away

My name is Orkun Kaan Ertaş. I was born in is Istanbul, Turkey and I am 17 years old. I am a student at Doğa Schools. I hope next year, in 2020. I will graduate from my school.

For the time being, I am working hard for the upcoming university entrance examinations. I still haven’t decided on the university yet and I have no idea of which profession I want to pursue, I think I make a decision sometimes next year. Since my earliest childhood memories I have been passionately interested in sports, especially basketball.

I managed to become a licensed member of the youth team of Beşiktaş Sport Club, which is one of the largest clubs in Turkey. However, during my time at the club, I never managed to win a proper cup. This year unfortunately I had to stop training for a while, to find more time to work on next year’s examination.

Another hobby that I particularly liked was to repair all the tools that were available at home and to examine the parts inside them. However, I have done nothing but ruin these tools. I have assembled the pieces of these deteriorating tools and got new tools. You know, if you ask my mum, she has made the most of these tools and worn them down.

Other than that, painting has always been a relaxing activity for me. I have always been interested in charcoal painting. I hope to improve my skills in this field in the future.

The first time I heard about the TÜBİTAK competition was when my history teacher announced it in the classroom, immediately sparking my interest. My teacher has encouraged me to participate in this competition. This was the 50th High School Students Research Project competition. Although I immediately decided to enter the competition, I did spend a lot of time and invest a lot of work to determine the subject I wanted to work on. For this, my teachers, family and relatives helped me.

The number of tourists visiting Turkey is continuously and rapidly increasing, on the verge of reaching 40 million visitors a year. However, these tourists do not find the relevant reference information when they come to Turkey. Therefore, in order to introduce tourists to all the historical sites and museums in Turkey, I chose to make the subject accessible through a program on the internet. In my opinion, this will increase the appreciation of museums and history. I had to post-pone the launch date a bit and, as I thought about the post-ponement, the name of my project just dawned on me: “History is just a click away”.

The program consists of:

1. Firstly identifying the location of the user in the program: by specifying the user’s location, the program can determine the proximity of museums by region and citie. It shows museums and historical sites in cities and provides information on how to reach them.
2. Provides information about the museums to be visited with abstract information and visuals.
3. In addition, the program provides a chronological summary of the user’s location.

I have encountered some difficulties while working on this program, namely:

1. Since my resources were limited, I was only able to take pictures of the museums and sites in Beşiktaş district.
2. Although I had some knowledge of coding, it was not sufficient to produce a suitable program. I therefore needed help from my coding instructors.

As a result, this application serves as a guide for tourists to get closer to our country’s 10,000 years of history.

I have the following suggestions for further development of this app:

1. For the visually impaired, an audio story can be added.
2. The application works for Turkey, but it can be used for all countries in the world, provided the relevant information is fed to it.
3. A 3D virtual tour feature can be added for those who do not have access to the museum.
4. Users can choose to receive a notification on their mobile phone when they go past a historical site.