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  BU Course Helper homepage

BU Course Helper

Inspiration

With class selections only around two weeks away we wanted to create a project which helps the class registration process simpler for students. Trying to find the right classes, figure out prerequisites, and piece together a schedule that doesn't conflict is a stressful process. We found ourselves juggling multiple browser tabs: the BU course catalog, Rate My Professors, and spreadsheets to plan our semesters. We wanted to make a more streamlined process for class selection

What it does

The goal of the concerned lions team is to help students decide what classes they need to take next by showing the its prerequisites. The current course planner by BU we felt could be more acessible by being more visual and so we really wanted to incorporate this into our class search.

How we built it

We built the Front-End with HTML, CSS, JS and the Back-End is build on python, specifically using the fastapi as well as using beautiful soup to scrape the BU CAS bulletin board.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many challenges throughout this process:

• issues with the CSS in the front-end
• linking the back-end to the front-end
• git merging issues.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are incredibly proud that we were able to create a functional product within the time limit despite the many setbacks and challenges we faced.

What we learned

We learned about the different frameworks used like fastapi, as well as how to webscrape. For half of our team it was their first hackathon and so this was a great learning experience for everyone.

What's next for BU Course Helper

In the future we hope to add more feature such as a hub tracker in addition to the tree as well as a connection to Rate My Professor and Terrier GPT to get better class selection advice for students. Lastly we also hope to gain more recent and indepth class data from BU rather than scraping from the bulletin board.

Built With

• css
• fastapi
• html
• javascript
• python