UNSW Course Planner

Inspiration

When I was planning my degree previously, it took me whole night to look through the handbook to construct a prerequisite graph manually so that I can see what courses should I do next semester so that I can do courses of my choice later in my degree.

What it does

The UNSW Course Planner automatically generate a graph to illustrate all prerequisites of a course that you entered and also recursively generate prerequisites of these prerequisites until it reaches courses without prerequisite at all.

It also links to the offical UNSW handbook so that the user can see details about a specific course in the graph.

How we built it

We first scraped all the data from UNSW handbook, and then built a front end with visjs in order to visualise the data in terms of course dependencies.

Challenges we ran into

I got banned from UNSW handbook web server because of scrapping and I hate javascript :(

What's next for UNSW course planner

Adam is working on parsing the prerequisite text from handbook using NLP in order to figure out the relations between different prerequisite courses.

We can also provide further features that could potentially benefit the users by adding more information about courses e.g. semester offerings, capacity, current number of enrolment.

Additionally, we could implement a discussion system so that students can review each courses.