Submitting Homework

Homework for CPSC 229 will be collected on-line through Canvas. You are expected to carefully scan your work into a PDF file. There are many free apps for smartphones and tablets that let you scan documents to PDF. One that I have used is described below. (Alternatively, it would be possible to use LaTeX or a word processor to write your homework solutions, as long as you can save the result to PDF, but I don't expect you to do that.)

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Genius Scan

You will need to make your entire solution to a homework assignment into a single, neatly scanned PDF, and submit the PDF through Canvas. This probably means using an app on your phone or tablet to scan the work. Free apps are available that can make good quality scans. I have not investigated all of the possibilities, but I have found that the app "Genius Scan" works well. It is available both for Apple's iOS and for Android. There is a paid pro version of Genius Scan, but the free version works well for our purposes. Other apps will also work. For example, the Notes app that is included with newer versions of iOS on iPads and iPhones can scan pages using the camera and save them to PDF.

I have tried Genius Scan on my iPad and on my old Android phone. Some instructions for using the app follow.

My Experience Using Genius Scan on iPad

After downloading the free version of Genius Scan onto my iPad, I was able to scan documents as follows. Procedures on your iOS device might not be exactly the same.

• The documents should be laid on a contrasting background, so that the edges of the document are easy to find.
• Open the Genius Scan app. You should be looking at the "Documents" page. If looking at a document, hit the "<" icon to return to Documents.
• To scan a new document, hit the "+" icon in the lower left.
• Select "Scan from camera..." from the popup menu.
• Point the camera at the first document page, and move it to get the full image in view. Genius Scan should find the document, hilite it in orange, and snap a picture. If not, you can hit the disk (with the rotating boundary), found on the right side of the screen, to take the picture. Go on to the other document pages, if any, and do the same thing. The number in the little disk shows the number of pages that have been photographed.
• Hit "Done" above the little disk when you have scanned all your pages.
• You should be viewing the first page of the document. Swipe left and right to move between pages.
• To adjust the quality, hit the "magic wand" icon in the lower right. You will get "EDIT", "FILTERS", and "FORMAT" tabs in a popup on the bottom.
  • If the document page has extra stuff around the edges of the photo, you can get rid of it with "Recrop" under the "EDIT" tab. You will see an orange hilite over the image, and you can drag the corners to match the corners of the page. You probably won't need to do this if the app properly located the page when taking the photo.
  • You probably want a black-and-white image. To fix the coloring, hit "Black and white" under the "FILTERS" tab. (Note that you can set Genius Scan to always make black-and-white images by default.)
  • You can still swipe from page to page while the editing tools are visible.
  • You can hit the "X" at the top right of the edit tools to close the tools popup.
• While viewing the document (with tools hidden), hit the "share" icon in the lower right to export the document as a PDF file. Or, on the Documents page, touch-and-hold the document name to bring up a menu, and choose "Export" in the menu.
• The free version of Genius Scan will only let you export to "Files" or to "Email". Email works well to get the document onto another computer, so that you can upload it to Canvas. The "Files" export includes saving to iCloud as well as to the iPad itself. On my device, it also had the option to share to Box, which is the on-line file storage site used by HWS. I have the Box app on my iPad.

My Experience Using Genius Scan on Android phone

After downloading the free version of Genius Scan onto my phone, I was able to scan documents as follows. Procedures on your Android device might not be exactly the same.

• The documents should be laid on a contrasting background, so that the edges of the document are easy to find.
• Open the Genius Scan app. You should be looking at the "Documents" page. If looking at a document, hit the back arrow ("<–") icon to return to Documents.
• To scan a new document, hit the Camera icon at the lower right.
• Point the camera at the first document page, and move it to get the full image in view. Genius Scan should find the document, hilite it in orange, and snap a picture. If not, you can hit the disk (with the rotating boundary), found on the bottom of the screen, to take the picture. Go on to the other document pages, if any, and do the same thing. The number in the little disk shows the number of pages that have been photographed.
• Hit the "check mark" icon next to the little disk when you have scanned all your pages.
• You should be viewing the first page of the document. Swipe left and right to move between pages.
• You will get "EDIT", "FILTERS", and "FORMAT" tabs below the document.
  • If the document page has extra stuff around the edges of the photo, you can get rid of it with "Recrop" under the "EDIT" tab. You will see an orange hilite over the image, and you can drag the corners to match the corners of the page. You probably won't need to do this if the app properly located the page when taking the photo.
  • You probably want a black-and-white image. To fix the coloring, hit "Black and white" under the "FILTERS" tab.
  • You can still swipe from page to page while the editing tools are visible.
• While viewing the document, hit the "share" icon in the upper right to export the document as a PDF file. (The share icon looks like three dots connected by two lines.) Or, on the Documents page, touch-and-hold the document name to select the document, and then hit the share icon at the top.
• The free version of Genius Scan will only let you export to "Device memory" or to "Gmail". Email works OK to get the document onto another computer, so that you can upload it to Canvas.