Inspiration
I am the cs and physic major.
What it does
It takes a user input of what majors they have declared at Purdue. From there it reads through a csv containing all of the undergraduate degree programs and finds any programs in the same college as the degree(s) provided. We then scrape the Purdue course catalog for required classes for each major and recommend the majors which are most similar to the previously declared ones.
How we built it
We use a ReactJS frontend to handle user inputs and send the inputs to a Flask python backend. This processes the input based on the csv files which we created from other official Purdue websites.
Challenges we ran into
We struggled to connect the front end of ReactJS to the backend in Flask. We were not able to send POST requests back and forth properly. We also struggled with data scraping from the catalog. Each major in the catalog has a different format, even if they are very similar majors, to fix this we had to open the catalog in a table format and parse the information very carefully.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of successfully connecting the front end and back end to make a complete web application. We are also happy with that fact that we can read through any major or minor program within Purdue, as we did not expect to be able to parse all of the different catalog types.
What we learned
We learned a lot about full stack development and interconnecting the front end of a website to the back end.
What's next for The Ultimate Pcap
Currently, searching for each major and minor program on the catalog in order takes a lot of time. To fix this we could try to handle catalog searches better. The best choice would be to have all of the catalog data stored on a csv in the format that we need it, but since this is too much data for us to handle an alternative approach could be to create a new thread for each major/minor that we consider and handle the web-scraping and comparison independently. Currently, the similarity between two majors is merely an estimate, it would be great to improve the parsing and have an exact count of the number of credit hours you would need to add to get a supplemental major. We also scraped all of the data from the Purdue transfer credit page to find ap credits and apply them to find a more accurate count of courses. However, we did not have enough time to apply this so it would be a nice addition in the future.
I would like to thank our most esteemed naming specialist: pwn goat Gabriel Samide here is a link to his website: https://gabri3l.net/
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