CometBuddy

Inspiration

Being new graduate students, we were driven by our individual experiences with picking our courses for the upcoming Spring semester. There are various social channels and helpful official resources for students but these are often obscure. Also, the course statistics on official sources are often not organized in a way that is insightful. The onus is on the student to consolidate information from various sources and form an objective opinion on the courses.

CometPlan aims to do all the heavy lifting for you!

What it does

Planning courses requires social interactions and individual research. CometPlan combines both aspects into a single platform which Comets can rely on to plan their courses. CometPlan relies on course data available from the NebulaAPI, developed by ACM @ UTD. The app will also be further developed to scrape data from Coursebook, the University's publicly available data sets and website.

The app will perform data analytics to gain useful insights into the trends involved in course selection. Students can view these trends when they search for a course on the app.

When students sign up, they will be incentivized to make their courses visible to their peers. This way, a student who views a course on the app will also be able to find other students who have taken the course in the past. The student can then interact with the right students to learn more about the course.

How we built it

We have used Microsoft Power Apps to develop the first iteration of the CometPlan app. MS Power Apps is a versatile platform that lets us develop apps quickly without writing code. MS Power Apps also allows us to integrate our apps with APIs and even perform data analysis.

Challenges we ran into

Gathering Data from Multiple Sources and drawing Insights from them. The complexity involved in obtaining recommendation graphs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Achieving the demo of three features: 1) Gathering data to generate a recommendation system 2)Generating a recommendation system 3)Intelligent Chat Bot with social media aspects

What we learned

Collaborating on the app gave us a chance to share our individual experiences with course planning. Through our interaction we gained many useful insights on how we can organize and analyze course data in a way that is more helpful to students.

What's next for CometPlan

After consolidating course data from multiple sources, our goal is to explore ML algorithms to discover useful trends about course selection and make them accessible to the students!