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RPICourseRecommender -- A course recommender python script for RPI students

Developers:

• Bogong Yang
• Yutao Sun

Inspiration

When we were deciding what courses to take for the next semesters, it was a slow and painful process. So we wanted to build something that gives us some suggestions for course selection

How we built it

Dependencies:

• Python 3.6+
• urllib.request
• bs4 (BeautifulSoup)

Test run:

• For the hackathon submission zip file, just run RPICourseRecommender/init.py

Usage:

This is for HackRPI 2019 (it's a hackathon). Did not have much time for arranging and refactoring, so....

• Open RPICourseRecommender/init.py
• Change the variable fetch to True for first time running
• Run crawler/profs.py manually for first time running (It should create some txt file)
• Change the rest variables to your preferences
• Create a txt file under /algo/doc named courses_taken.txt, it should include all classes the user has taken (One course per line, in form of 'XXXX-XXXX')
• Run RPICourseRecommender/init.py

Challenges we ran into

• Scraping from RPI website was hard. Used a ton of time to find where the information was located
• The project structure is a huge mess...

Accomplishments that we are proud of

• Well at least it works, kind of

What we learned

• How to scrape data from websites
• How to use txt file as database XD

What's next for RPICourseRecommender

• Add templates for other majors than CSCI
• Use database instead of txt file. Reading from txt is sooooo slow
• Refactor code

Notes:

• This thing currently only works for the major CSCI. For other majors, add the templates in /algo/doc, and modify the scripts accordingly (hmmmm)
• If you modifies this script and use it for a larger set of data, REMEMBER TO PAUSE EACH REQUEST FOR AT LEAST ONE SECOND SO THAT YOU DO NOT DDOS STUFF

Built With

• python