How-De-gree

Your four-year plan made easy. How-De-gree: Plan your degree, stress-free.

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Inspiration

The current degree planning system provided by Texas A&M University is outdated and difficult for students to navigate. Many students struggle to organize their courses properly, especially when trying to balance major requirements, minor or track electives, and the university’s core curriculum. As a result, students often submit degree plans that get declined by advisors due to missing or misplaced requirements. This leads to more work for the advisors and can impact the students ability to register for courses. The process is frustrating, time-consuming, and prone to human error. Our team wanted to create a smarter, more user-friendly solution that makes degree planning simple, accurate, and visually clear. We aimed to design a system that saves time for both students and advisors by automating much of the process.

What it does

Our project, How-de-gree Planner, is an improved version of the existing degree planner that automatically generates a four-year course plan based on user input. The user simply enters their major, current year, optional minor or track, preferred maximum hours per semester, and any classes they’ve already completed. The system then compiles a personalized schedule that fulfills degree requirements and distributes courses across semesters in an optimized manner. The interface is modern, interactive, and easy to adjust. Students can drag and drop courses, make substitutions, and instantly see how changes affect their progress toward graduation. The goal is to make degree planning both efficient and accessible to every student.

How we built it

We built How-De-gree Planner using React, Tailwind CSS, TypeScript, and Python. React was the core framework for creating a responsive and visually appealing frontend web page. Tailwind CSS was then used to provide a visually appealing and intuitive design that is easy to follow for users. TypeScript was used to manage the front-end logic and handle user interactions by defining each data structure, for example the courses and semester. Python was used for data scraping and processing, specifically to extract course information from Texas A&M's course catalog and organize it into structured JSON files. To start off, our team of three divided responsibilities as follows: Member A focused on front-end design and user experience, Member B handled data scraping and organization from the Texas A&M course catalog, and Member C developed the backend logic that checked degree completion and generated optimized course sequences. Through effective collaboration, we combined our individual components into a unified tool that makes academic planning simpler and smarter for students.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we faced came later in the development process when we began to integrate everyone’s contributions. As we were using GitHub for version control, we ran into multiple merge conflicts while combining our front-end, backend, and data components. Since not all of us were fully familiar with Git commands at first, resolving these conflicts required time and careful coordination to ensure that no one’s work was accidentally overwritten. Through this process, we learned how to properly use branches to separate tasks and prevent overwriting, which made collaboration smoother as the project progressed.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of creating a functional and visually appealing degree planner that can genuinely help students at Texas A&M. Our project successfully combines backend logic, data scraping, and front-end design into a cohesive tool that simplifies academic planning. One of our biggest accomplishments was how well we planned and organized our work early on. Before diving into coding, we spent time discussing our goals, delegating tasks clearly, and setting up communication channels to make sure everyone knew their responsibilities. This preparation gave us a strong foundation and allowed us to start efficiently with fewer obstacles later on. We’re also proud of how much we’ve grown as a team since our first hackathon. During TAMUhack 2025 last semester, we didn’t know how to use GitHub at all, so our way of sharing code was through a shared Google Doc, constantly copying and pasting code into VS Code to test it. This time, we learned how to access repositories, push, pull, create branches, and merge code properly using GitHub. Mastering version control made collaboration smoother and more professional, and we’re proud of that progress. Understanding how to use GitHub effectively is a crucial part of software development, and we know this skill will help us greatly in future hackathons and projects.

What we learned

One of the most important things we learned throughout this project was the value of communication and balance. Working together on a large project under time pressure required constant updates and coordination to make sure each component aligned with the rest. At times, we found ourselves working continuously without breaks, which led to burnout and reduced focus. Taking short physical and mental breaks helped us recover and return with fresh energy and clearer ideas. From a technical perspective, we initially began developing our project in JavaScript but decided to transition to TypeScript as the project grew more complex. This shift helped us better manage our codebase by introducing type safety, clearer interfaces, and easier debugging. We also strengthened our understanding of React, particularly in how to manage state, props, and component reactivity while maintaining clean, modular code. Learning to integrate TypeScript into a React-based project improved our overall workflow and taught us how to write more scalable and maintainable code for future development.

What's next for How-De-gree

Looking ahead, we plan to expand How-De-gree by allowing students to log in using their university credentials and automatically import their completed coursework from the university database. We also want to implement a feature that detects potential scheduling conflicts and suggests alternative course combinations, combining some features of the current Aggie Schedule Builder with the Degree Planner in Howdy. In the future, our goal is to extend the platform to support graduate students, so it’s not limited to four-year undergraduate planning. Additionally, we aim to partner with Texas A&M advisors to ensure that the generated degree plans meet official requirements, making the platform not just a helpful tool but a trusted academic resource for all students.

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