UW-myPlanner

Inspiration

This project was inspired by our own struggles of not having plans to pursue our intended majors.

What it does

UW-myPlanner is a web app that provides student users with plans of their course schedules based on their intended major, course-taken, and number of courses the user wants to take per quarter. The plan will be generated based on the course requirements and availability which are a part of our data bank. Five optimal course plans with the fewest quarters will be provided to the users. If there are less than five valid plans, the program will return all the valid plans. This is mainly designed for freshmen and sophomores who are planning courses to fulfill the major requirements.

How we built it

Our program is designed to return optimized quarter plans of the courses the user needs to graduate. Each course is assumed to be offered during certain quarters of the year and this program does not take prerequisites into account so that we decided to write the ClassInfo class. Each course is represented by a ClassInfo object in our program and a ClassInfo object can tell you the name of the courses and the quarters this course is offered. In addition, ClassInfo class can take a list of course names and return you a List of corresponding ClassInfo objects and this method is used to get the courses we want to iterate after it has the required courses as Strings.

Challenges we ran into

Generally, the biggest challenge is that we did not know what to do at the beginning. Unlike our assessments, we need to not only figure out what methods do we need but also write them out with everything we learned. At the beginning, we had little idea of how our program should run so that we need to try various ways to do it. Later, we had to start over because we found the original proposal is too hard to finish on time and we changed the proposal as well.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to use our own web app to solve our problem!

What we learned

We always received help from our instructors on completing the assignments and the Server.java, index.html, and database were always provided. However, in this project, we learned how to utilize those tools and noticed how important they are in our daily programming. In programming, we always need a method to test our project, because there are various bugs that are not obvious for people just looking from codes. We were able to learn the process of completing the web app from nothing.

What's next for UW-myPlanner

We will implement more majors and allow users to have more personalized options such as being able to select which quarter to start taking classes. We are also thinking to present the plan in a more visual way.