SCU Course Optimizer

Inspiration

• Having gone through registration many times as students, we've always dealt with the confusing, unintuitive, and at times frustrating process. We wanted to make a solution to this by centralizing and

What it does

• Our service uses a web scraper to find professor ratings from ratemyprofessor and parses through published workday schedules in order to show what sections are offered next quarter. We also utilized Tencent to help handle our AI agent who provides recommendations and helps sort through professors.

How we built it

• We used a combination of Claude and Cursor to help us create the files and framework for the frontend site. We also asked for a lot of help from ACM staff and Tencent to help us resolve issues that we didn't know how to fix. We started with an idea of what each page should look like and which pages it should gather data from, and then slowly developed the rest of the site as we went on.

Challenges we ran into

• The biggest challenge we had when developing our prototype was connecting our Tencent application to our site and the chat service we wanted to use. At first, we had created a Tencent application and connected OpenAI for the chat service and ElevenLabs for a speech to text service, but we repeatedly ran into an issue where the front end of our site would not load the Tencent connection. We solved this by deleting the original Tencent application and created a new one with just a chat capability, and instead of having to pay for OpenAI chat credits, we used Groq instead.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• The biggest accomplishment we're proud of is creating a site that successfully loads courses and professor names from both Workday and Rate My Professor. Going from just an idea to a final site was the biggest sense of accomplishment for all of us. This was our entire group's first time participating in a Hack-a-thon, and it was a very enjoyable, challenging, and educational experience overall.

What we learned

• We definitely learned a lot about the process that is behind a Hack-a-thon and the development process behind a project. We had never done a Hack-a-thon before, and it was a deeply educational experience, and even though we only had a few hours to work on our project, we did a lot of learning along the way about the tools that are available to use, particularly Tencent.

What's next for SCU Course Optimizer

• We hope to continue working on our project and get it to a point where it can allow users from other schools to look up information about their professors and the classes they offer. A future feature would the exporting the saved schedule into your Google Calendar to make it easy to then register on Workday.

Built With

• javascript
• python
• typescript