Inspiration
Our summer orientation was a two-day long hassle by advisors and upperclassmen to explain AP credit, Gold search, GEs, units, and finding classes. During this time, advisors had too many students to help to be able to adequately provide individualized advice, making class registration stressful for us and many other students. Thus, we wanted to build a tool to make the course selection process easier by helping students specify their needs and preferences.
How we built it
We started off with designing our full-stack solution on paper and brainstorming with this solution, working out each requirement and bottleneck we’d face. After developing a prototype, we created a Github repository, with each team member working on different stages of the pipeline. For our IDEs and supplemental tools, some members utilized Cursor, while others remained with VSCode and some Claude prompting.
Challenges we ran into
Some of the challenges we faced included understanding how to parse through json files, scrubbing through large data sets (the UCSB developer API, Daily Nexus Grades csv file) effectively, and Git issues such as merge conflicts.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
This was all of our team members' first hackathon and managing a big project like this. Being able to figure out how to effectively use Github, AI tools, and combining our files into one project was a massive accomplishment for us.
What we learned
We learned about the major challenges of managing a full-stack application, including synchronizing the connections between different algorithms, utilizing proper data structures, cleansing data, managing a Github repository (and dealing with merge conflicts and version control, for instance). In addition, we learned about the importance of having a clear goal in mind for a project. In our case, we had to balance broad utility (a schedule helper tool) with specific features we wanted to shine through (automatically filtering class time conflicts, and ranking classes/entire course schedules based on specific user preferences for example).
What's next for Gaucho Guardian
Implementing more fields for user preferences (for instance, by implementing Rate My Professor ratings if the user desires), and enhancing our data collection methods are next steps for us to take.
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