Change is Good.

On June 7, 2007, tens of thousands of Penn State students logged onto their computers awaiting the release of student football tickets. Within fifty-nine minutes, over 21,000 tickets were sold. Thousands more were unable to get their tickets. Many of these students were then forced to purchase tickets at vastly inflated resale prices from other students, many of which don’t even attend the University Park campus. While I was able to get football tickets this year, many of my classmates and friends were, unfortunately, unable to do so. Acquiring football tickets for Penn State games is, quite simply, a fiasco.

The idea has been discussed before, but as a final for my English 15 class, I put together a working "model" of what an online, ID-card based electronic ticket system would look like. It doesn't utilize any fancy PHP or MySQL database technology, as it's not really necessary for a simplistic model such as this one. It's more of a conceptual depiction of the logistics of said system, and not so much a technical demonstration. Nevertheless, this idea has the potential to be fleshed-out into a full-fledged, working ticket management system.

Have a look.