EAS(Y)cheduler

Inspiration

Finding the right courses to take has always been a challenge for every college student. Who would ever be diligent enough to find all the prerequisites for every course they need? Every college student would have specific courses that they would need to take in order to graduate and we are here to help make their lives easier. After all, what is worser than not being able to graduate just because you missed out on a few requirements?

What it does

EAS(Y)cheduler helps students to plan what courses they want to take each semester by listing all the courses available. This is done through scraping a website (https://classes.osu.edu/class-search/#/) for all the courses that OSU CSE offers. EAS(Y)cheduler also allows students to rate their professors and enter any related comments as we believe that professors make a huge difference in a student's academic success.

Technical Aspects

Since our website mainly serves college students, we decided to focus on just the OSU CSE students as a start.

Front End We strived to keep our front end sleek, clean and responsive. Most styling were styled with Bootstrap, along with some personalized stylings for various sections. We have also utilized (Material UI Icon)[https://mui.com/components/material-icons/] for some of the icons that was used in our website

Back End We wanted to keep our backend simple, utilizing React components to make our code reusable and readable. Some difficult problems that we solved while developing the back end of our application were figuring out a way to store data on firebase database, scraping data from website and the drag and drop functionality that was used to improve UX.

Challenges we ran into

Finding a way to store our database on Firebase Realtime Database has been a challenge. As there were various data that needs to be stored, it was challenging in coming up with a good model for the data. Scraping for data from the website were also difficult as we were met with challenges with extracting the prerequisites of the different courses to implement the functionality that we initially wanted. However, due to time constraints and the complexity, we had to make a difficult decision to forgo the functionality.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our final product was pleasant to the eyes and fully functional. The overall experience from the beginning to the end was seamless and accomplished our goals to make course planning easier for students. The drag and drop functionality was a resounding success and we believe that it greatly improved the user's experience as it was instinctive.

What's next for EAS(Y)cheduler

If EAS(Y)cheduler were to make progress, the next goals would be to implement the planned features that never fully made it into the final product:

implementing a login functionality for users to save their 'plan' so that they would be able to refer back to it and make necessary changes whenever needed
implementing the prerequisite functionality so that users would know what courses they would need to take specifically when planning