Testudo#

Motivation

Our motivation was to create a scheduler that took more information into account, in order to provide for peoples needs better. For instance, currently Coursicle (the most popular UMD scheduler) does not have any way to look at if the route in a schedule is handicap accessible, or tell you what classes are associated with certain terms: "Semester Long Project" for example. It simply allows you to place and remove classes on a schedule and look at them. There's no assistance/further functionality. We wanted to take a crack at a solution to this problem, and with it being heavily interdisciplinary that made it perfect for our team of differing backgrounds.

What it does

Currently, using a slew of collected data and some machine learning. Using keywords, our system searches the details of classes to find the classes most relevant to your query. So, not only are you able to look up classes by name (ex. CMSC351), but search them by content, related courses, and key requirements. So for example, looking up "fun cs upper level requirement" returns popular computer science upper level requirement courses and "easy gen ed" returns general education courses with high GPAs.

Further goals and Challenges encountered.

Though we were unable to tie our scheduler into geographical information, that would be our next goal. There were many difficulties in collecting the data and putting it together in a cohesive way, so that definitely held back what we were able to do this weekend.