Inspiration
Keeping track of prerequisites, especially for high-level classes can be a headache, and having an easy way to have it all visualized in one spot for any arbitrary course felt like a useful tool for ourselves and other students.
What it does
When opened on a course page, the extension finds all the course co- and prerequisites and recursively calls itself on them to create a total list of all requirements for a course, which is then displayed in the extension window.
How we built it
The extension runs on standard HTML/CSS/JS, with a script injected into the background of McGill course pages which communicates with the popup script that runs when the window is opened.
Challenges we ran into
Our project depends on a number of asynchronous processes, and making sure that they were executed and completed in the correct order was tricky, especially for our team since we don't have a ton of experience with Javascript.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Even though its a rudimentary process, figuring out the natural language processing aspect of the project was very rewarding, especially given how interested we are in that field.
What we learned
We learned a substantial amount about effective project management (and solving merge conflicts), but beyond that, this project really improved our understanding of Javascript in a networking context.
What's next for Prereq Planner
With more time, we'd really like to improve the language processing algorithm -- what we have right now works in most cases, but more sophistication would really help catch the edge cases.
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