GOLD to Calendar

Inspiration and Goal

The inspiration was a common issue that UCSB students face each time a new quarter rolls around--it takes an unnecessarily long time to manually input our schedules into Google Calendar. The goal of GOLD to Calendar is to automate the process.

How we built it

Our project has two parts: converting the HTML in the GOLD student webpage into a CSV file, then taking the CSV and importing it to Google Calendar for the 10 weeks of the school quarter. We utilzed Beautiful Soup to parse the HTML, Google Cloud for the Google Calendar API, as well as related public code.

Challenges we ran into

One of the problems we ran into was an authentication problem in Google Cloud, which we resolved by reading through the documentation and changing the settings in our Google Cloud project accordingly. Another challenge was a bug that incorrectly converted UTC time to PST in code that we utlized from Github.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We familiarized ourselves with how to use many new and useful tools, such as Beautiful Soup, Google Cloud, and Github. Although we ran into many challenges, we were able to perservere and solve them via wisely using our resources and intuition to guide us. We were able to achieve everything we set out to do!

What we learned

We learned to use new tools such as Google Cloud and Beautiful Soup, and deepened our understanding of Python.

What's next for GOLD to Calendar

Next we hope to automate the web scraping of information from the GOLD student portal as well as add information about finals onto the Google schedule.