UTD Professor Showdown

Inspiration

Scheduling classes is a confusing and time consuming task with all the information available. This especially makes the twice-annual enrollments season a potentially frustrating endeavor. We wanted to make an app that makes selecting professors for classes easier by combining data sources into one place.

What it does

UTD Professor Showdown uses the UTDGrades dataset, scraped RateMyProfessor scores, and the Nebula API to show users a simple, sorted list of the best professors available for a given class using a dynamic algorithm.

How we built it

We developed in the app Python with use of a RateMyProfessor scraping utility, the Nebula API, and UTGrades data. The UI makes use of Tkinter for Python with the Azure theme.

Challenges we ran into

We came in with limited Python experience and ran into challenges using the APIs used and parsing Json files.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that we made an app we could legitimately use next semester as well as even finishing a product for our first Hackathon experience.

What we learned

Prior to the project, only one of us has experience in Python as well as working with APIs. Getting the UI frontend to work was also a learning experience.

What's next for UTD Professor Showdown

We would like to update the app to include more data we collected and organized, but haven't integrated into the frontend yet, as well as possible UI reworkings.