Assisting Assist

Inspiration

Being a student worker at the MESA center, I meet a lot of people that tell me their journey throughout community college. Often times I hear that someone took a class that they will not receive credit for, holding them back a semester or more, wasting time that they do not have.

What it does

Picking your choice of community college of where you may want to take a class at, my program takes the data from Assist.org, giving an output of the class and what it articulates to, while comparing it to another school. You are able to clearly see which classes you may be able to take at your home college compared to another and see if it articulates so you can get credit for the correct requirements for the college you are trying to transfer to.

How we built it

I used Assist.org, typing a .txt file of the class and what it articulates to. Then building functions and arrays in C++, I was able to organize it accordingly to read what the user inputs, and outputting the correct major, college, and class requirements. AI was another tool used as it makes things more efficient to blend everything seamlessly.

Challenges we ran into

Everytime I added a new major or college, it became a new challenge. I had to learn how to integrate the new info in an organized manner that would output everything clearly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I was proud of overcoming the challenges I previously mentioned, as everytime I was able to successfully integrate the new data, it was very exciting for me. But in general, I am proud of my entire program as a whole because I think it is a very beneficial tool that I will still be able to use outside of this event, and now be able to implement into my workplace. I enjoy helping people succeed and I think this will be a great help to many.

What we learned

I was able to touch up on my C++ skills because I haven't written code in a while now so it was good practice. In addition, it became a very useful way to learn about AI prompting, how to get effective results using AI, something I believe will be crucial to our future.

What's next for Assisting Assist

There are plenty of more things to add to this program as I was on my own and did not have much time to finish everything. For starters, I would begin by adding all the UC colleges and expand to all of the colleges offered on Assist.org. I want to be able to give people all the options possible in order to help them succeed. Another thing I would add is offering suggestions as to which other community colleges may offer the same classes to the same articulation so people don't have to do extra work to explore their options. To create further ease for users, I would add a sort of checkbox to pick all the community colleges they may want to take classes at so they can compare multiple colleges at a time. Furthermore, since I have only learned C++, I would like to build on this to create it into something like a Google chrome extension that people can easily pull up on the side while they are on the page to compare right there and then. Maybe one day it could be integrated with an AI that will easily read the info so the data does not have to be manually typed in for the developers.

Built With

• c++