GradTrak

Inspiration

A shared frustration with the lack of helpful tools for planning a four year schedule. The campus-provided tools aren't used by the majority of Berkeley students, which leads to most either resorting to excel spreadsheets, which are unreliable, or even just giving up on planning for their future. This builds an unhealthy mindset which leads to students being severely underprepared for their future (to the point where some have to delay declaring their major because they forgot a class). It also means students miss out on opportunities to pursue their life goals, as certain classes might prepare them for internships they want, but students are left without proper means of keeping track of these important classes.

What it does

The main function is that it integrates a four year planner into a Degree progress report. This is enhanced by easy visualization (highlight classes that are being taken a specific classes, dull classes that have already been taken) and avoids cross-referencing in planning a degree.

How we built it

The languages we used for the frontend were Javascript, HTML, CSS using Angular as a framework. Node.js was used in the backend to simulate pulling class information and major requirements from a database.

Challenges we ran into

Since we were relatively new to the scene of web app development, we didn't come to the hackathon knowing how to code in every language or use every tool that we needed to fulfill our idea. However, instead of changing our idea or decreasing the quality of the final product, we decided to take the initiative to learn new languages and use them in the short time we were given.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creating a clean interface that's easily understandable as well as aesthetically pleasing. In addition to this, it's amazing we were able to build the infrastructure of a web app before using a server. Making an API using node.js to organize the data and the logic was a first for most of us.

What we learned

Other than the new languages we learned from this experience, we also learned how to use tools such as angular and node. In addition to this, we learned how web development worked including servers and https.