Interactive USYD Student Handbook

Are you sick of reading cluttered unit handbooks from the USYD website? Look no further! Non-Deterministic Finite Coders presents an Interactive USYD Student Handbook.

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Inspiration

When we were first year students navigating our way through university's challenges for the first time, the last thing we wanted was a complicated and messy enrollment system and handbook. We are inspired to create a better interactive handbook for first year students that allows for easy visualization.

What it does

Our immersive project displays the student handbook in an interactive format. Our interactive handbook displays the courses for a specific degree, in a tree-like structure, inspired by skill trees in video games. Students can select units if they meet the prerequisite and the unit is not prohibited, and this can be easily visualised through our colour scheme.

How we built it

We used Java, Gradle to automate the build for the project. We used Git for version control and we also used Java Swing to help create the UI. data was retrieved from the university handbook, for advanced computing. This was done manually however, it is possible to scrape data from the website using a web crawler. This would have been designed if we had been given more time. That would allow for general use across many degrees.

Challenges we ran into

Designing the UI was challenging because we did not understand some of the inbuilt functions well initially. Parsing the text files was difficult, and there were some challenges with fixing bug fixes at the end.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the innovative prototype for the interactive student handbook. We were proud that we were able to work collaboratively within 24 hours to create our project for our first hackathon.

What we learned

We learned the challenge of working collaboratively, integrating components from different team members and dividing work effectively.

What's next for Untitled

Spreading to all degrees using a web scraper (this was confirmed to be possible in R). Allowing post graduate, and undergraduate students. Allowing more input from the user, such as what semester they are starting, and their marks to compute pre requisites. automated suggested pathways for students when they select a major or minor.

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