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De Anza Guide

A 3-in-1 platform that helps De Anza students plan their transfer courses, discover personalized campus events, and get answers to their questions through an AI chatbot.

Inspiration

As students at De Anza College, we experienced firsthand how complicated and overwhelming college life and the transfer process can be.

Students preparing to transfer must navigate different course requirements for each university and major, often switching between multiple websites to compare information. At the same time, De Anza College offers many valuable workshops, events, and opportunities, but information is scattered across different platforms, making it easy for students to miss out.

We wanted to solve these problems.

Rather than simply creating another website that provides information, we wanted to build a platform that helps students plan their academic goals, access important information at the right time, and make the most of the opportunities available to them.

De Anza Guide was born from a simple idea: students shouldn't have to figure everything out on their own.

What it does

De Anza Guide is a 3-in-1 platform designed to support De Anza students throughout their academic journey and transfer preparation.

It brings together three main features in one place: Transfer Planner, Campus Events, and an AI Chatbot.

1. Transfer Planner

The existing ASSIST website provides valuable transfer information, but navigating and comparing requirements can be difficult and time-consuming. We wanted to make this process simpler, more intuitive, and more accessible.

Students can select their target universities and majors to view the courses required for transfer.

Instead of checking each university separately, they can compare transfer requirements across multiple universities in one place. Common requirements and university-specific requirements are visually distinguished, making it easier to understand which courses are needed.

Students can also track completed courses and identify remaining requirements, allowing them to clearly see their progress toward transferring.

2. Campus Events

De Anza College offers numerous workshops, information sessions, and transfer-related events that can help students succeed.

De Anza Guide brings these opportunities together in one place, making them easier to discover.

Events are prioritized based on students' majors and interests, ensuring that the most relevant opportunities appear first.

Students can also subscribe to our automated email notification service. Every morning, subscribers receive an email highlighting events happening that day, along with important upcoming events over the next seven days.

This helps students stay informed and take advantage of valuable opportunities without constantly searching for updates.

3. AI Chatbot

Our AI chatbot provides students with a convenient way to ask questions about De Anza College, transfer planning, course requirements, and academic information.

It helps students understand complex requirements and determine what steps they should take next.

Instead of repeatedly searching through multiple websites, students can receive guidance through a single, accessible interface.

Our goal is to make academic information easier to understand and help students make more confident decisions about their future.

By combining these three features, De Anza Guide allows students to manage their academic planning, discover opportunities, and find answers without switching between multiple platforms.

How we built it

De Anza Guide was developed by bringing together three core components: Transfer Planner, Campus Compass, and an AI Chatbot.

The platform evolved from two independently developed projects, Transfer Planner and Campus Compass, which were originally designed to solve different challenges faced by De Anza students. We then brought these projects together with an AI chatbot to create a unified, three-in-one platform.

The first component, Transfer Planner, was developed to help students select their target universities and majors and organize their transfer requirements. We used course articulation information from ASSIST to structure university-specific requirements and make them easier to compare.

The second component, Campus Compass, focused on collecting event information from De Anza College and recommending relevant opportunities based on students' majors. We also developed an automated email notification system to deliver important event information directly to students.

The third component, AI Chatbot, was incorporated to give students a more interactive way to access information and receive guidance about De Anza College, academic requirements, and transfer planning.

We worked on integrating these three components into one unified platform while maintaining a consistent design and user experience.

For development, we used a Python-based backend, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for the frontend, along with database systems and AI technologies.

We collaborated through GitHub, developing individual features, sharing code, and working together to connect everything into one cohesive application.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was presenting complicated transfer requirements in a way that was both accurate and easy to understand.

Each university and major has different course requirements, and there are often multiple ways to satisfy a single requirement. Simply displaying a list of courses was not enough to provide meaningful guidance.

We had to carefully organize the data and design a visual system that allowed students to compare multiple universities while easily identifying which courses they needed to complete.

Another major challenge was combining multiple independently developed systems and features into a single platform.

Transfer Planner and Campus Compass had different structures, functionalities, and data management approaches. Integrating them while incorporating the AI chatbot required us to address differences in user authentication, data handling, and website design.

We also needed to ensure that the three main features could work together while maintaining a consistent and intuitive user experience.

With limited development time, we had to communicate frequently, prioritize essential features, and continuously solve problems as a team.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our proudest accomplishment is successfully bringing three different features into one unified platform designed to support De Anza students.

With Transfer Planner, we created a more intuitive way for students to compare university transfer requirements and visually track their course completion progress.

We also developed a personalized event recommendation system that prioritizes campus opportunities based on students' majors, along with an automated email service that helps students stay informed about important events.

By incorporating an AI chatbot, we added another way for students to access academic information, ask questions, and receive guidance.

Rather than focusing only on adding more features, we prioritized usability, accessibility, and making complex information easier to understand.

Most importantly, we transformed problems we had personally experienced as students into a functioning website designed to help others.

What makes us most proud is not simply building a technical project, but creating something that has the potential to make a meaningful difference in other students' lives.

What we learned

Throughout this project, we learned that building good software involves much more than writing code.

While implementing technically challenging features is important, understanding users' real problems and creating solutions that address their needs is even more valuable.

Integrating multiple systems and features also taught us the importance of communication, teamwork, task management, and effective collaboration through version control.

One of our biggest lessons came from approaching problems from the user's perspective rather than focusing only on technical implementation.

We realized that a successful website is not necessarily the one with the most complicated features, but the one that makes complicated information simple and intuitive for its users.

Above all, we learned that technology is not the ultimate goal. It is a tool that allows us to solve real problems and help people.

What's next for De Anza Guide

Our goal is to turn De Anza Guide into more than just a hackathon project. We want to develop it into a platform that students can genuinely rely on throughout their college experience.

We plan to improve the Transfer Planner by expanding and refining university and major requirements, allowing students to compare academic pathways more accurately and receive more personalized course planning guidance based on their progress.

We also hope to enhance our campus event recommendation system to better reflect students' interests and academic goals. In the future, we would like to introduce notifications for important transfer deadlines, academic milestones, and other opportunities.

For our AI chatbot, we plan to improve the accuracy and personalization of its responses so that students can receive more useful and reliable guidance.

We also want to strengthen the connections between all three features, allowing students to move seamlessly between academic planning, event discovery, and AI-powered guidance.

In the long term, we hope to expand De Anza Guide beyond De Anza College and make it accessible to students at other community colleges as well.

Ultimately, our vision is to help students spend less time searching for information and more time focusing on their goals, opportunities, and future.