Mountain

Calendar Aggregator combining data from PSU IST Blogs, Academic Calendars, Facebook Events, and other sources.

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The value of a top ranked university is more than just classes; it comes from the events held there. These events are often crucial to attend to achieve the full value of your college experience, with a great example being HackPSU.

These events are important for more than their intrinsic value; they also have social value by connecting people with similar interests. These events is where some of the best of my friends were made.

Events are crucial with an importance on the level of classes. However, we aren’t doing a great job of letting students know about these events.

Events at Penn State are sent using a variety of mediums:

  • Email: for most students it is one of the most effective ways to receive notices, but the number of emails quickly piles up. It gets harder for students to keep up, and if the event is set far into the future, it can still be missed if it isn’t added manually to a calendar
  • Blogs are supposedly used by students to share events, with the idea that if everyone is reading the blog they will notice the events. Unfortunately, not everyone reads these blogs; those who don’t are never aware of the events in time.
  • Social Networks are another useful means of sharing events. If the students are subscribed to the application, they will get notices. However, not all students use these programs, and they may ignore or disable pop-ups regarding these events.

So why use this one tool? Because this program isn’t designed simply to share events. It draws on data from the technology stated before and compiles them into a single calendar program. This way all events can be clearly seen when they’re going to occur in an organized fashion. No event is forgotten because it was only mentioned once, and all users will be able to check and particular date and time and see if there is an event scheduled for there.

Use Case

Users can use the system to assist in managing their times by informing them on events prior to the actually time of the event in an easier way of viewing.

Users can also decide which events they would be willing to by showing the locations (How far would the event be from their residence or classroom.How long would it take to arrive? could they be late?) and temperatures (Would they be willing to travel through rain?) on the day of the event to prepare themselves.

Users can now view the details of the events in an easier way to prepare for whatever it might be as well (Whatever was send/parse from the other mediums).

Users can favor/filter the events that they want to view, out of the multiple that could be happening anything given day?

University Clubs can now post to our system to manage their event details and keeping their club members informed.

Future Use Case:

Users can will have the capabilities to post their own personal events (class times, study times) to view from the system.

Possible Mobile Application with Updates from the mail Calendar system sent to the user.

Direct Usage

  1. Go to the index.html page to navigate to the homepage

  2. Click on the calendar tab to view the calendar

  3. The link will take you to the events page displaying the details for the event you wanted!

  4. Scraping code folder contains the code used to scrape facebook events and parsing Compass and Academic Calendar websites' ics files

  5. Event_List_Compiler.py contains the code for rendering the template developed using Jinja2. event-temp forms the template for the page events

  6. index.html is the landing page designed using bootstrap and icalendar

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