Better Bulletin

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  List of courses from the search bar results

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  Tree data structure outlining course requirements

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  More complex data structure of a course with many requirements

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  Another example of a complex data structure with many unique requirements

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  Database with details of each program and course

Inspiration

As undergraduate and first-year PSU students, we've found navigating the current PSU bulletin challenging while searching for majors or courses. We were looking for a more intuitive solution, one that showed the relationship in a flowchart-like style, simplifying the viewing experience for students.

What it does

The Better Bulletin is a versatile search bar that lets you seamlessly explore programs and courses and displays them in a flowchart-like format. Additionally, each card provides comprehensive information about the course or program including the overview, requirements, and more!

How we built it

We built Better Bulletin using 3 components: a scraper, a backend, and a frontend. The scraper is written in Rust and quickly crawls through the Penn State website to collect and organize course and program data. The backend is written in Javascript using Express.js. It is an API for our front end to interface with bulletin data. Finally, the frontend is written in React. It requests data and then displays it in a useful manner for students.

Challenges we ran into

One of the most challenging parts of building Better Bulletin was finding an optimal way to store a lot of data efficiently. Even if we were going to be inefficient with space consumption, we needed a proper data structure to access complex data relationships such as course requirements. To tackle this challenge, we broke down the problem on paper and found that we could use popular data structures such as trees and stacks to store data efficiently.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• The comprehensive database and back-end which are used to compile thousands of PSU courses and programs.
• A nice and interactive UI, to change up the bulletin design

What we learned

• How to manage large quantities of data and manipulate them to fit a formatted style

• Implementing new libraries to achieve a nice viewing experience with a flowchart format

What's next for Better Bulletin

Although we did not finish what we had hoped for, our next step is to integrate majors and list the prerequisites and corequisites for each program. Each card would highlight some recommended courses based on similarities. Also, we plan to implement AI capabilities, allowing personalized searches for courses and programs based on your preferences.

Built With

• express.js
• node.js
• rust
• sqlite