Inspiration
We arrived intent on building an app to help people study. We ended up pivoting to something far more impactful, and more close to home for most students: tuition. College burns through savings, and often leaves many with crushing debt; if we could ease that burden even a little bit, if the service expanded, it could collectively save millions. Too many students end up required to take a 5th year of college—only 19% graduate within four years, according to the New York Times.
If we could design a system to provide students a clear, easy to follow college roadmap, we could give them the framework they need to graduate on time.
What it does
QuarterBot uses a friendly automated chat system to put together a student's college path. We turn a vague major, and a perplexing major requirement chart into an easy to follow optimized quarterly schedule. Our recommendations are designed to evenly spread classes out, allowing for plenty of room for general education requirements, and electives.
By making the system as fun and intuitive as possible, we're hoping that we convince as many folks as possible to plan ahead, and save.
How we built it
We used PHP and AJAX to handle requests and do all of our optimization in the backend, and HTML/CSS/JS to present and send user input. By utilizing a super-intuitive UX, we're hiding a ton of the complexities of calendar optimization, turning a mind-numbing and frustrating task into a fun, almost social activity.
Challenges we ran into
We had some issues implementing php, and developing the optimization algorithm. Turns out that those course charts are complex for a very good reason: with so many potential paths for receiving the same degree, there was a lot of work necessary to find the best based on user input.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're excited to have been able to take such an awful process, and present it in such a not-at-all-awful manner. We had some fantastic team-work at play to put together the massive library of courses necessary, as well as the sorting algorithm for schedule design.
What we learned
Nobody on our team (save one!) had previous experience with PHP; at the end of this project, we can all proudly say that we contributed in a meaningful way. We also learned how to work in a high-stress, time-based team environment; this was our first hackathon, and we couldn't be more excited with our resulting team chemistry.
What's next for QuarterBot
We hope to continue to add other majors, and other schools to our system. With more time, we'll also be able to alter our front-end to be able to deal with students who are not first years. There's significantly more complexity with students who've already completed a year or more of college, and we're looking forward to tackling that.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.