Four Year Plan

Initial setup
Search bar
Sample course selection
Course suggestion and credit count

Inspiration

As a group of three Freshmen, we all ran into the difficulty of academic planning when the course information is divided among multiple webpages. It becomes necessary to have many tabs open to keep track of the prerequisites of the prerequisite courses. Checking that you fulfill overall degree credit requirements while not going over the maximum credit per semester is harder that you'd think. Not to mention that electives must fall under certain distributions and areas of study. Four Year Plan (FYP) helps students plan their years at university in an interactive and visual way.

What it does

"Four Year Plan" is a web application that helps JHU students create and organize their four year plan. A user signs up for an account, provides information about their major, and then FYP sets up a page displaying a four year, eight semester plan with their major's required courses. For courses that fulfill other distribution requirements or electives, users may use the search bar tool, which has course data for both fall and spring semesters, to look for and add courses to their plan. FYP allows users to easily drag and drop courses from semester to semester to reorganize.

How we built it

FYP is a web application written mainly using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. First, we established goals and agreed on a general layout. We also decided to use Flask for the Sign Up/Login form. For the visuals such as the dragging boxes, we took advantage of Bulma, a CSS framework. To access the JHU Student Information System API, we downloaded the online contents as a JSON file and included it in HTML.

Challenges we ran into

Limited experience in web development
Updating credit count per semester
Accessing API JSON file on HTML

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Search bar
Drag and drop box feature
Color generation depending on areas of course
Course suggestion feature

What we learned

We learned how to access and parse API data for specific use. We familiarized ourselves with Bulma and Flask libraries. We found out that GitHub repositories can be difficult to edit together.

What's next for Four Year Plan

The FYP should check whether your course selections fulfill credit amounts, prerequisite, and requirements specific to the user's major. There were more things to include like Summer/Intersession courses, AP, and transfer credit. Customizable display and layout would be a fun feature.