Comet Planner

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Inspiration

Incoming/Existing Comets at UTD are generally confused about how to choose courses when a new semester begins. It has also been a nightmare for the Professors and Student workers to deal with these repeated queries over the traditional emails. CometPlanner is here to automate the bridge to reduce man power and stress.

What it does

The CometPlanner has several roles to play while solving the problems that the management faces in the institution.

• A Calendar interface that displays the office hours of the faculties and the TAs for the courses. The students now are able to book appointments, know their availability from this portal. This way, it makes the life of the Professors/TAs easier than managing huge chunk of emails for appointments.
• A weighted ratings computed for each section offered throughout the year. This helps rate the section overall based on various factors such as grading criteria, examination load, duration of classes, etc. This helps the student make decision on the combination of courses that he can take to optimise the work load and perform well in the semester as he learns.
• A recommendation platform that suggests different combinations of the Degree plan for the student. This means that the portal suggests the best way to select courses for the upcoming semester enrolment. This feature takes into account several input factors from the user such as the major, school, class level, etc and generates combinations of sections that student can enrol in. This feature is supported by the weighted sections feature as described above. This helps reduce the number of emails that the Academic advisor receives on this regard, I can't imagine how many!! ## How we built it The project consists of two modules in general, the frontend and the backend. The frontend section is built with Reactjs framework and the backend was based on python flask. Most of the components in the UI was programmed with custom functionalities and each of them reaches out to the backend API for data. The backend python API directly interacts with the Nebula API and returns the result to the UI after processing and manipulation. It was a challenge to build such a huge task but our speed helped us counter all the features in time. ## Challenges we ran into The UI components were causing async issues due to the API call delay. We used awaits to counter this issue. The python API faced a chunk of errors while transforming the Nebula Data to desired format. Luckily, libraries such as json, requests came in handy. ## Accomplishments that we're proud of An end to end flow of the features, even though not all the corner cases are countered, the intended flow or the best case scenarios are captured well. ## What we learned Never underestimate the UI work, it is time consuming and debugging is a nightmare. Never underestimate the python errors, they will happen even if your code is tested well. ## What's next for Comet Planner To integrate this system with UTD so as to create a smooth login flow to each student, get more data to create and expand the feature base of this project.

Built With

• flask
• python
• react