Team Night Crew

The support all slugs deserve.

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Inspiration

The project first began as Project Rainbow Trout, a symbolism for our understanding of the diversity in students there are on campus and the nimbleness of our peers in navigating challenges before them. Even so, there are significant setbacks in our way from time to time, one of which includes the long wait times to make an appointment with a counselor. As such, as a group a friends who happen to program primarily at night, we formed Team Night Crew for the ACM Hackathon 2023 to create Slug Counselor to alleviate this burden. We hope you find our project helpful!

What it does

This helps generate course lists that fit with a student's current progression in the major. As of right now, it only works for Computer Science, but this is because of the peculiarities in the UCSC General Catalogue where they specify things such as "Either", "At least one of the" or "4 from the list below" and etc. which cannot be parsed by a computer very easily. As such, we decided to simply make a course list for Computer Science because it was the major most familiar to us and from there, we have the blueprints to further build upon.

How we built it

We used Flask and Bootstrap to build our program. Originally, we intended to make use of Machine Learning in the form of TensorFlow in order to provide the most accurate and helpful schedules to students but ultimately settled for a static algorithmic approach.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into time constraints as the project was difficult to parallelize across multiple team members with sections of the code depending on one another and without the proper testing, a lot of time was wasted on waiting for one another. In the future, we hope to better address this problem by making use of the Kanban system where we can keep track of how far each task is going along such that we can minimize down time and get better allocation.

Furthermore, we also ran into difficulty as we were forced to scrape the general catalogue for most of our information which was very tedious. As described above, the major requirements course lists are formatted in difficult-to-parse ways. In addition, the descriptions of requirements for classes were written with nested lists making use of Oxford commas and semicolons in ways which, in addition to prose description of certain requirements such as class standing and major restrictions, caused it to be extremely hard to parse. Should a public API have been provided by the school, it would have made success with this project much easier to achieve and would have allowed for a better polished product.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

While it has many compromises, we are very excited that we have created something that was functional and fulfilled our basic goals in this project in such a short period of time. We are also very proud that we were able to create something that could be put towards good use by the slug community as well as a well-placed foundation should we decide to further improve upon this project.

What we learned

We learned that we need to do better time management. As alluded to before, we intend to make use of industry standard practices in the future to streamline our developments such that we can accomplish even more in the future.

What's next for Team Night Crew

We plan to attend the GDSC Solution Challenge of 2024. If you're interested in hearing more from us, feel free to reach out to one of our members on the organization.

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