UCSC Made Easy

Planner in use

Inspiration

UCSC's provided 4-year course planning template is not helpful. Trying to find and understand all of the information required to build a simply livable schedule takes far more work than it should. The need to navigate multiple tabs to access course prerequisites, manually track fulfilled requirements and earned credits, and potentially schedule advisor meetings for unresolved issues adds unnecessary complexity. UCSC Made Easy does just that, it makes the whole process easy.

What it does

UCSC Made Easy allows you to input your courses from all 4+ years of your education, and it will automatically serve you all of the necessary information such as course information and links, major requirement satisfaction, general education requirement satisfaction, and your total credit count.

How we built it

The foundation of this project is its data, with information on 10k+ courses and major requirements from UCSC. Using React and Tailwind CSS we crafted a user-friendly interface designed to make course planning easy for anyone. Our Flask backend efficiently stores users' plans in the MySQL database under a UUID, eliminating the need for unnecessary engagement like logging in.

Challenges we ran into

Web scraping proved challenging and time-consuming, and the management of a substantial list of courses across many user inputs posed latency challenges.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of our UI. Both of us have an interest in design and wanted to see how well we could do, and we are content with this result.

What we learned

With each React project, we gain increased comfort in handling intricate components, and this endeavor, in particular, presented the most dynamic elements to manage. Additionally, our introduction to Tailwind was great, and we are pleased to have discovered it.

What's next for UCSC Made Easy

Refining the application to be good enough for serious use. More web scraping and ensuring that data is accurate, polishing the UI to be as smooth as possible, and hopefully getting in touch with the school to share this platform and help students.