CourseScheduler

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  Course Schedule #1

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  Course Schedule #2

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  Course Schedule #3

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  Course Schedule #4

Inspiration

Throughout the years, our entire team has experienced various difficulties selecting and arranging our course schedules on one platform called DraftMySchedule at Western University. Students are wasting time trying to figure out a suitable timetable without any time conflict for the coming semesters. There is a lot of confusion during the course selection process, such as scheduling conflicts between courses, or not knowing whether the desired course can all fit in perfectly in one timetable. Therefore, we want to introduce a platform that optimizes the course selection process and saves time for students to explore on their own.

What it does

CourseScheduler is a course scheduling platform that places emphasis on creating an easier solution for students to make their drafts for course selection. Therefore students don’t need to delete the courses with time conflict and reselect courses from the beginning through a complex process over and over. CourseScheduler will generate all timetables that fit all courses that students select without any time conflict. The timetables with time conflict will be ignored. CourseScheduler can smooth out the chaos and confusion for students. The platform has several features:

1. Users can select the courses from the drop-down list by inputting either the course name or course number. Then the courses will be added to the cart. When clicking “run”, the timetables will be generated.

2. Users can change to the next pages to see different timetable options. 

3. Users can easily delete the course in the cart, and run again to see different results. 


How we built it?

CourseScheduler is built with JavaScript, Bootstrap, Vue. The data of courses is crawled by Python and stored in a JSON file.

Challenges we ran into

UI design is a big challenge for us with short time constraints. Everyone on the team is not quite familiar with UI designing skills. But we figured it out finally by keep trying and attacking the problem from different angles.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

In the end, we were proud that we successfully solved a problem that had troubled us for four years. What’s more, we felt challenged but proud that we were able to come up with an idea and solve it within just two days. It was very exciting to see our platform come to life. We enjoyed the whole experience of building things that can actually help people around us and probably more students from other universities.

What we learned

Throughout the creation of CourseScheduler, we learned about how to quickly brainstorm, then take an idea from scratch and implement it. During the early stages of production, we allowed everyone to freely come up with innovative ideas. We realized that it is important to start from our own point of view and solve the problems that are around us. Along with efficient idea generation, we were able to distribute different tasks to each team member, and we also learned to build a good team dynamic to solve the issues together. Lastly, we were able to read up about and try out data crawling and creating websites.

What's next for CourseScheduler

The next step is to get this platform rolled out to Western University and other universities. Furthermore, we wish to add more features to it. One of the features would be marking the courses in the cart as “Mandatory”, “Optional”, or “Ignore”. This feature will enable students to lock the mandatory courses in their schedule, and add optional courses on top of that. Students can also ignore some courses to see how their schedule changes. Additionally, we would like to include all the labs and tutorials into consideration. As a result, our platform can be more detailed and serve more students that are in need.

Built With

• bootstrap
• javascript
• python
• vue