UCSC Major Reqs Planner

Plan out your courses required for your major

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Inspiration

Our main goal was to be absolute academic weapons. To achieve this, we needed to have a clear vision of what we were going to be doing in our 4 college years. Now the idea has been famously developed by multiple UCSC students because the struggle is real and common, but why do we still feel so lost when we plan our courses? Find out why we stand out below.

What it does

Our website takes into consideration the prerequisites needed to advance in your course pathway. In the original UCSC course catalog, students struggle to organize their classes because of how separated information is. We made sure to have classes, respective prerequisites, and the calendar all in one page for simple, organized, and efficient planning. Additionally, these academic plans are often requested by academic advisors. So we added an ‘Export’ button that allows for various accessibility and sharing needs.

How we built it

We webscraped the UCSC Course Catalog to obtain data on all of the course information and prerequisites for each major. We learned and used ReactJS to build the full-stack website.We add interactive buttons, images, loading signs, drag and drop, and section-wise scrolling for seamless user experience.

Challenges we ran into

All of us had trouble setting up the environment for ReactJS (npm install, Node). We didn’t have experience with the level of debugging skills required, especially on niche systems like Ubuntu, different Mac versions, and Windows (we had all). Additionally, it was some of our first times using GitHub to collaborate on code, so we went through some pains of rewriting code we lost :0

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite those hurdles, we learned so much in 2 days. ReactJS is so popular and widely used, but only 1 of our 4 teammates had introductory experience with it. Regardless, we took it upon ourselves to self-learn and communicate when we needed help.

What we learned

In team projects, work is often split up and done individually. However, our team had a great flow just by picking up tasks that needed to be done and grinding it out. The dynamics and skill distribution made the process much easier. This hackathon will go in the books as one of the best just because of our united eagerness to learn and create :)

What's next for UCSC Major Reqs Planner

Learn and use AI to auto generate a 4 year plan for the user. Utilize LLM to generate customized course recommendations . Have import functionality from csv data to populate the website planner. We also plan to add features that would show the description of each class.

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