Inspiration
We realized that many of our peers didn't have a plan for which classes to take. As a result, a lot of students end up taking random courses that don't fulfill any requirements, and at the end have to cram in a bunch of courses in order to graduate on time (or have to graduate late). We agreed that it is a problem, and we decided to come up with a solution to alleviate the situation.
What it does
Our product not only help students keep track of their units, it also helps them plan for their remaining quarters, helping to make sure they finish their GE's and major courses on time. Especially since many students eventually decide to switch majors, the program gives them an easy way to visualize their schedule and lets them know if it is feasible to graduate in 4 years or less. It can save students a lot of time since they will not have to go into Academic Advising (which is often rushed and not comprehensive), and it can also save students tuition money.
Our program looks at the requirements for different majors based on the UCSB Course Catalog and creates a schedule for them. It also takes into account when different courses have been offered in the past - fall, winter, spring - in order to give students an accurate depiction of their schedule. On top of this, the program takes into account the courses the student has taken already and looks at any GE's they have to complete in order to provide an accurate schedule.
How we built it
This project is really a product of teamwork, as we divide and conquer different parts of the project. Tatiana worked her magic and created a chart using HTML, Vivian laid out the foundation for the page with Javascript and HTML, and Coco took a plain HTML page and made it come to life through CSS.
Challenges we ran into
All of us were beginners in coding at the start of the Hackathon. This made things difficult as we had no idea where to start, what languages to use, and had absolutely no clue how to execute the project. Due to this, it also took us awhile to settle on a project idea. However, we were able to create something we were all extremely proud of through the help of mentors and Google.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We all came to the event with little to no technical experience, but we were all eager to learn how to code. We were able to accomplish a lot in a short period of time, and we are all extremely proud that we threw ourselves into the deep end and followed through with our project. There were difficulties along the way, but we were able to push through and learned a lot from the experience.
What we learned
By creating College Life Planning, we learned how to execute a coding project from start to finish. We learned the usefulness of creating "pseudocode" and breaking down our projects step-by-step before we began coding; through workshops, we were exposed to a variety of coding/programs, such as iOS, python and GitHub. However, the biggest takeaway from this Hackathon is definitely learning to be okay with not knowing anything going into a project, and figuring things out along the way.
What's next for College Life Planning
Our next step is to make our product more comprehensive, so that it includes every major offered at UCSB. Our hope is to eventually have all UCSB students use this program to plan their course load. In turn, this will hopefully reduce the number of students who have to stay longer than they want to (save tuition!). If it proves successful, we would love to have other colleges implement this so that students everywhere can benefit from it.
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