Degree Dash

Degree Dash

Inspiration

We were inspired by our own experiences as students and the uncertainty around choosing classes and deciding between professors. By wanting to alleviate that stress, we created a network students can refer to, draw from, and contribute to as well.

What it does

We have a database of courses offered in the comp sci department, some math courses, and info about Professors. Students join the website and are able to view other students’ reviews of courses and Profs, write more reviews, and connect with other students.

How we built it

Frontend: We used Figma to create wireframes to decide the features we wanted to add and to design the flow between pages and overlays. Used HTML for the basic structure of the webpages and CSS for styling purposes. Used React to make the website dynamic and to add interactivity between components.

Backend: We used an SQLite database to store all course data, professor and user data. The backend also connects through index.js as the central hub that brings everything together: it receives all requests, applies middleware like CORS and session management, and routes them to the appropriate files—/auth requests go to routes/auth.js where Passport.js handles Microsoft login, while /api/courses requests go to routes/courses.js which uses the Course model to fetch or modify data. Authenticated middleware protects routes that require login and session cookies keep users authenticated across requests.

Challenges we ran into

Learning languages we were not familiar with was a bit tasking at first, but by helping each other, we were able to learn quickly. Also, trying to see the website from a user's perspective and design it optimally was surprisingly not as easy as we expected.