Peter's Cooked-O-Meter

A screenshot of the page with one class added and no professor or class info inputted
A screenshot of the page with classes added and the difficulty rating calculated (based on past student ratings)

Inspiration

We came up with this idea as we were discussing the upcoming course selection and realized that it is hard to gauge how difficult our potential schedules might be. We then decided to make a webpage that helps students like ourselves with course selection by saving students the effort of scouring the internet and instead providing them with an overall difficulty rating of their potential course load.

What it does

Peter's Cooked-O-Meter is a website that allows UC Irvine students to input the courses they plan to take along with the professors they plan to take them with and get a rating on a scale from 1-5 of how difficult (or "cooked") their schedule is! This rating is based off of real reviews from past students on ratemyprofessors.com, and allows students to gauge whether or not their potential course load seems manageable or not.

How we built it

Our webpage fetches data from the ratemyprofessor API and uses it to populate search results for the professors and classes on our webpage. Data is first fetched from the ratemyprofessors search page, which then allows the website to fetch data from the professor's individual page, and finally uses this to fetch data about the specific class inputted by the user. Using the average difficulty rating for each inputted class, we created a formula that accounts for both the individual difficulty of each class and the total number of classes the user has inputted. The formula returns a rating on a scale from 1 to 5 (5 being the most difficult), which is then displayed on a "meter" with a lighthearted message describing how "cooked" the load is.

Challenges we ran into

Getting the API from the backend into the frontend. Returning the correct data from the API in the backend. Trying to properly arrange all the elements on the page with CSS. Creating the formula that calculates the difficulty of the class.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Hand-drawn graphics, fuzzy search method, clear UI/UX, fast retrieval time for the API

What we learned

We learned how to use new applications such as Figma and GitHub, as well as how to retrieve information from APIs.

What's next for Peter's Cooked-O-Meter

To continue developing Peter's Cooked-O-Meter, we plan to have the webpage show the top comments about each class from ratemyprofessors.com and work on error handling (such as stating that a teacher has no preexisting ratings if a user tries to input a UCI professor and/or class that is not available on ratemyprofessors.com).