Syllabusted

Inspiration

At the beginning of the semester, I set out to become more organized than I was last semester. I tried using various schedule apps and google calendar, but entering each assignment from every syllabus every time, I knew I would lose steam and stop adding to it eventually. The perfect course planning app would already have all my assignments set out for me without having to be manually added. This is the idea behind Syllabusted.

What it does

Syllabusted allows users to upload a pdf of their syllabi from their classes. It processes the text to extract dates and assignments for the semester. These scheduled events show up in a list on the user's schedule page. Optionally, the user can export all the events to their google calendar.

How I built it

We relied on the devfest web development tutorial to create a python backend with flask. An instance of mongodb is used to hold user data. We used the ocr python library PDFMiner to convert pdf to text. The google calendar api allows the user to sync with their google account. The frontend uses foundation.

Challenges I ran into

This was our first time working with any of these technologies, so we had to dive right in and learn quickly. Also, one computer with lots of progress crashed at around 2 am, which set us back a lot. But we kept going!

What I learned/am proud of

We learned the basics of web development, and I'm proud to have turned our idea into somewhat of a reality. Also, we learned to next time continuously back up files with github.

What's next for Syllabusted

We're going to keep developing the text processing algorithm to read syllabi in more efficient ways. Then we can release it to the Columbia community!