CICS CoursePlanner

Inspiration

Given the wide variety of courses to pick from and lack of readily available information regarding their difficulty, it is a difficult feat for students to select courses that are geared towards their main interests and that they will get the most out of.

CICS CoursePlanner intends to assist students with developing a balanced, ideal course plan so that they can take the courses that will help them succeed most in the future.

App Views

Profile Page	Planner Page

What it does

Planning Ahead: Make sure you get the prerequisites satisfied for future courses
Focus your Degree: Indicate your interests to take the courses that matter most
Informed Decisions: Easy access to RateMyProfessor reviews for every course

How we built it

The project highly emphasizes algorithms with graph theory. We used the following process:

Integrate with school systems to get course information
Build a network graph that represents pre-requsite to course mapping
Interface with RateMyProfessor API to calculate course ratings
And surely a lot of algorithms to develop an optimal course path!

Challenges we ran into

Testing the backend to ensure that the results produced for any given set of inputs was a rigorous process, as there were many edge cases to consider. A tool that serves to aid students in planning something as important as their college education must provide accurate results so that students can make informed decisions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of having developed and combined several graph algorithms to create an efficient, precise solution to the problem of building an optimal path of courses given a set of interests. In addition, it was very fun to work on developing a clean front-end design to display the results in a simple, informative fashion.

What we learned

We have learned that communication is very important when working with a project that involves multiple components, in order to avoid conflicts as much as possible. It is essential that we follow certain specifications so that both the front-end and back-end teams follow a good guideline to build their respective software.

What's next for CICS CoursePlanner

We hope to eventually achieve additional functionality such as providing direct access to accurate reviews from students who have taken the course (such as what is provided by RateMyProfessor) and integrating other majors on campus to reach a wider audience.