About the Project Inspiration How often have you struggled to remember the date of a mentor session, or accidentally missed the deadline for an important assignment? For many of us, it would be much easier if important dates were conveniently organized in a calendar, so that’s what we did!
Purpose Our goal is to drive meaningful engagement between college students, their mentors, and their professors, which is critical in our liberal arts college culture. From office hours to mentorship sessions to lecture times, every college student has times when they’re overwhelmed and find it difficult to stay on top of their busy schedules.
However, research has shown that people are 86% more likely to go to an event if it’s on their calendar. While it can be tedious to manually input events into our calendars one by one, Syllabuddy makes the syllabus-to-calendar connection seamless by directly extracting information from your syllabus and transferring them as events to your calendar.
Usage We created the Syllabuddy Website where users can upload a PDF or image file of their class syllabus and use Syllabuddy to export all important scheduling details to their Google Calendar. We chose to focus on integrating information into Google Calendar, as it’s one of the most common calendar apps used on 5C campuses and usable from any mobile device. Let’s say the syllabus includes dates and times for these events: Class Times, Office Hours, and Mentor Sessions. Our program will export these recurring events (ex. MW 1:15-2:45pm) to their Google Calendar.
Challenges and Accomplishments One of our biggest challenges was accounting for all the different ways that professors choose to format their syllabi. There are hundreds of different ways that professors choose to type their office hours, time formats, and date information, so even though it was challenging to write code that could account for all the minor variations, we’re proud that we did it!
As beginners, we were also challenged by the short time frame, which made integrating all the different parts of the project together difficult. We want to continue to work on streamlining the process so Syllabuddy is as convenient as possible!
What's Next for Syllabuddy Ultimately, we want to make Syllabuddy available for all college students to use. In the future, we would look at adding dates for midterms and finals, including the locations of meetings and any Zoom links, as well as any course material required for that session or lecture.
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