CougarCompass

Inspiration

Mid-semester is often the time when we are surrounded by exams, quizzes, events, and, in overall, a challenging schedule. This spring, it was the same; courses were turning out to be hectic. However, the excitement that CU was organizing a hackathon did energize our team. The busy schedules and time conflicts made us also wonder, 'Why not build a solution to a challenge that we actually faced as ambitious students (those who try to excel with every classes, make sure their commutes are on time, make track of all the events happening on campus, and attend all the career/social fares.) This, therefore, gave birth to the idea of a compass that navigates one to a successful college experience. We have named it- 'CougarCompass.' The initial name, however, was CampusCompass because our team believed initially that a rhyming name would make a good impression :)

What it does

CougarCompass emphasizes the principle of 'easy-access.' Hence, the UI has been carefully designed to facilitate navigation and quick information access. Primarily designed for Caldwell students, the platform will bridge any communication void between the admin (often the student clubs, departments like campus safety, student engagement, or even professors).

The project has been divided into four sub-sections: 1) Academia: As the name suggests, this section will be looking over the student's academic status and ways to excel their journey. Our primary target here was a 'Course-Suggesting' system. When logging in for the first time, each user is asked to submit their audit form, based on which we will generate a percentage bar (to make the bachelor's degree process a game-like scenario). The system will take account of the user's current major and, hence, also the courses taken. It will then offer them three unique course plans (Easy, Medium, and Hard). The difficulty modes are based on the user's willingness to take back-to-back classes or multiple higher-level courses. The section will also bring the personal meeting creation space and the blackboard hyperlinks together, making it much easier to manage and navigate. It shall also have a weekly schedule sub-section in the upcoming versions, where students will be able to see their regular course schedules, and/or any upcoming quizzes/exams. This will make navigation much easier as the students will have all the required streams- meeting, blackboard, courses, and current schedule in one compact yet beautiful space.

2) College Life: The platform strongly believes in embracing the values of 'Solo Commitment that lead to Embedded Movement.' It is often from junctures like college events or any group culture that students become friends. Friendship that is based on the foundation of mutual support and the harvest of further healthy competition and opportunities. Recognizing this as an important virtue, the College-Life section will, hence, have an event section. This section will emphasize on events happening based on their deadlines and further constraints put by the admin. One advantage of this feature is that students will not only get to 'see' the opportunities but also RSVP beforehand. Our ambition was also to include a point-system based on 'streaks' and 'event participation/volunteering pattern,' however, under the limited time and energy constraint, we were not able to include this aspect in the current version. As of now, the platform

3) Career : Hard work and late-night study sessions often, however, do not lead one to finding what they love to do or excel in certain skills that interest them. It is, therefore, an important aspect of college life that a student expands on their networking, strengthens their resume, and rediscovers his/her potential every day. Hence, the career section here will function on alerting the user from the respective admin about any specific events that would interest the user based on their major or patterns of event signups. The hyperlinks in this section will allow the user to schedule 1:1 meetings with the professional and diligent career services group at Caldwell. Additionally, it will list all the upcoming networking events with an exclusive internship/job search section.

How we built it:

Our initial approach was to build only a 'course suggestor' bot that would list courses for the upcoming semester so that we wouldn't have to worry much about planning for the courses beforehand. Hence, the first step was to get all the data about the courses offered at our university. We created a JSON file manually and started off like that. With PDF scraping tools and comparison to our university's major-specific course plan, we were, therefore, able to generate three unique JSON files with the courses (with unclashing schedule) that will be based on the user's preference of 'easy,' ' medium,' or 'hard.' Alongside, we also started working on the idea of cougar express schedule tracking, as the manual of schedule made available is a bit challenging to navigate, and also the site's alert system could benefit from the reasoning if there was a change in the cougar express's schedule. Using basic HTML and CSS, therefore, we started with the design and integrated the JSONs from Python, calling its unique APIs. ChatGPT was used in certain areas for the beautification of webpages. The images used were from Caldwell University's Archive and Tailwind made it easier to add further dynamics into the play.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge we ran into and are running into (as of writing this sentence) has been the course-suggestion section. Although our back-end has been perfect with the output, the front-end API calls seem to have been something we lacked experience in. Nevertheless, we have set the foundation and a well-defined trajectory for where the platform heads now.

Accomplishments that we're proud of:

We were able to extract data from a PDF that the user would input, and although our front-end was unable to represent the data in the course_suggestion section, we are very proud to have learned and performed with this functionality. Additionally, we are excited to share our logic that helped generate a unique course plan for users. Also, as our profile shares the support of admin features, it was a unique learning opportunity, which we are proud of.

What we learned

The main thing that we learned from this hackathon is how ideas play an important role in brainstorming the technical aspects of the project. All of us have shared the story- maybe for a particular class, we were looking for ideas that fit in the assignment, or maybe we used a certain section asked in the assignment. However, this time, we were selecting the technologies to be used based on the idea and subsequent brainstorming we were implementing throughout the process. Additionally, implementing the admin logic was new and a refreshing concept that we are excited to utilize in our upcoming projects.

What's next for CougarCompass

1) Collaboration with different Student Clubs and Departments on campus: We plan to collaborate with the Academic Success Center in the spotlight series, where we plan to implement our idea of Leaderboard rankings and specific scores to increase further healthy competition or 'streak' within the students as they engage in further opportunities. 2) With the Career Services, we plan to provide an exclusive list of internships and relevant events based on the user's tendency to participate in different networking opportunities.

Built With

• ai
• and
• chatgpt
• flask-api
• javascript
• monogo-db
• next
• node.js
• python
• render
• tailwind-css
• typescript