Grizzly Tracks

Inspiration

Every student at the University of Alberta has had deal with the stress of trying to design the perfect schedule. A common theme for many is taking a trip to Rate My Professor to determine who other student think are good professors. Another thing many have noticed is most ratings are on either extremes and tell you little about what you need to know. We believe that using the Universal Student Ratings of Instructions(USRI) gathered by the university of Alberta we can find a more accurate view of things.

What it does

We have developed a website that allows you to search up any course or professor and see their ratings. We display 4 ratings which are composites of the various scores given by students. This allows students to help inform their decisions on who to choose for their professors. It is limited to lecture sections as many lab and seminar instructors don't have enough data to provide meaningful information to users.

How we built it

We used Python with Selenium to webs scrape the USRI Data and then moved it into a MongoAtlas database. We then used next.js and Prisma to develop and front end and backend.

Challenges we ran into

The first major challenge we ran into was scraping the data. The USRI website was primarily javascript meaning we had to use a webdriver to slowly crawl through all the pages. As such any mistakes in the process of scraping or moving to the database would lead to a major loss in time as we'd have to process thousands of pages again.

The second major challenge we ran into was getting the search function to work properly. Documentation wasn't very available for next.js making it very difficult to develop the functionality.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to scrape over 10 thousand course USRI scores and databased them for usage.

We managed to make a functional and aesthetic website that makes it much easier for student to find USRI data.

What we learned

We have a much stronger understanding of website scraping. We also used this time to learn the relatively new next.js framework.

What's next for Grizzly Tracks

Currently we want to add more functionality for planning schedules.

Built With

• mongoatlas
• next.js
• prisma
• python
• selenia