SlugCredits

Need credit for a UCSC course but for whatever reason you'd like to take it at a community college? With SlugCredits, you can find every transferrable CC course for a given UCSC course.

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Inspiration

Some of our team members have had reasons for taking classes outside of UCSC and to transfer them over. These reasons can range from financial reasons to scheduling conflicts, and making sure that each course will articulate can often be a pain. Tools like link make finding articulation agreements easy, however only for comparing degree programs. If only something like that existed to browse for a given course equivalency instead...

What it does

SlugCredits provides an intuitive interface to search for any course equivalency for a UCSC course shown on ASSIST.org. Search for a UCSC course with drop-down menus for a UCSC department and course number, and SlugCredits will return a list of every course offered by the California Community College system that has course equivalency to the given UCSC course.

How we built it

We housed our frontend in a classic HTML/CSS interface, brought to life with JavaScript. Our frontend interacts with a SQLite database built with a variety of scripts in several programming languages that provides the information on course equivalencies. Data was scraped using Node's headless web client puppeteer, collecting dynamically loaded course data to be parsed for our database.

Challenges we ran into

Despite having various skills from past classes or hackathons, our idea pretty much threw our entire team into unexplored areas. Jasmine and Shreya tackled UI, frontend, and database integration (all new skills), while Kevin and Akash explored JavaScript, TypeScript, and databases for the first time. We also had to make some cuts on the technologies we used, such as struggles with MongoDB causing us to have to switch our database of choice halfway through the competition.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

All four of us learned a whole new programming language and how to work with a SQLite database, a feat we all feel proud of for spending under 24 hours of working time on this project. This is also the first time any of us are building a full stack application,

What we learned

We learned what it takes to pull together a full stack application. The interaction of frontend, backend, and databases is something completely new to all of us. For instance, Akash learned not only how to program in JavaScript/TypeScript, but web scraping with headless clients (Node.js' puppeteer package) as well.

What's next for SlugCredits

This is a project that earlier could have had a lot of personal utility to members of this team, so it's something we care about greatly. Next steps for SlugCredits involve sprucing up the UI and user experience to feel like a fully polished application, moving to a full web application with React, and eventually dynamically generating the database with current data from ASSIST as it changes.

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