CourseMiner

A website that finds minors and certificates that you are close to completing or may already qualify for.

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Inspiration

As UGA students we have seen the multitude of opportunities available at our university. There are around 100 majors and over 150 minors at the University of Georgia. With all of the classes required for most degrees, some students find it easy to pick up extra minors with the classes they already have. Or they can simply take an extra class or two to have another minor. The problem that many of us have run into is a lack of a centralized list of minors/minor requirements. Learning what minors you have already earned or are close to earning requires a lot of research. Many students don't even think to look into it. We set out to solve this and simplify the process.

What it does

Our website, CourseMiner, lets a UGA student upload their transcript. The website then analyzes the transcript and uses the credits the student already has to find minors they either already have the credits for, or are only a few credits away from earning. All of the relevant minors are displayed to the student. The name of the minor, a description, and the number of credits still needed (if any) are visible. The page also gives the student the exact classes that will fulfill the rest of the minor's requirements.

How we built it

CourseMiner’s frontend was designed & prototyped in Figma, and then made in HTML and CSS. The backend was made in Java with the Python ScraPy library for data scraping.

Challenges we ran into

UGA Bulletin's minor listing has inconsistent formatting, making data scraping difficult. Requirements were often fluid as well, making it a challenge to programmatically account for them.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to scrape over 40 minors and match their requirements to user submitted courses to sort them by hours to completion. We also worked very hard to make sure the students’ experience would be a positive one when using CourseMiner and we are very proud of our UX design overall.

What we learned

We learned a great deal about web scraping, frontend/backend connection, and interlanguage communication.

What's next for CourseMiner

The possibilities for CourseMiner are vast. However before making major updates we will be addressing edges cases that had to be removed in the interest of time and comparability. After this the first thing we plan to focus on is adding any UGA certificates to our system. This will increase the possibilities for students who are looking to expand their resumes. There will also be an account system added to CourseMiner. Students can make an account and add their transcript which would be saved. They could update their transcript later and log back in to see all of their academic options. We also would like to expand CourseMiner to other universities to help all college students reach their potential. We see a bright future for CourseMiner and have ambitious plans for our future.

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