TreeDegree

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  TreeDegree Home Page

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  Sample Computer Science Skill Tree

Inspiration

TreeDegree was inspired by how confusing and opaque real university degree plans are when they’re buried in PDFs and long prerequisite paragraphs. We wanted a way to make the hidden structure of majors visible, so students could actually see how one course unlocks another. Turning academic rules into something you can visually explore was the core idea.

What it does

TreeDegree turns course catalogs and major requirements into an interactive skill tree where each class is a node and each prerequisite is a connection. It shows not just what you need to take, but also the alternate paths you can use when requirements say “or.” This lets students understand bottlenecks, options, and progression at a glance.

How we built it

We combined UCSB’s course catalog with structured major requirements and used a local LLM to convert messy prerequisite text into clean logical rules. Those rules are compiled into a dependency graph and then rendered using React Flow. The result is a system that faithfully represents both course prerequisites and major-level OR/AND logic.

Challenges we ran into

University prerequisites are written in natural language with a lot of exceptions, making them difficult to parse reliably. OR conditions and elective pools don’t fit cleanly into traditional prerequisite trees, so we had to invent new ways to represent them. Balancing accuracy with visual clarity was also a constant challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built a full pipeline that turns real UCSB data into a usable, interactive roadmap. The system correctly handles alternate paths, bottleneck courses, and elective groups without flattening everything into noise. Most importantly, it works on real majors, not just toy examples.

What we learned

We learned that degree requirements are really logical systems hidden inside prose. We also discovered that LLMs are extremely powerful when used to translate messy text into structured data rather than to generate new content. Good data modeling turned out to matter just as much as good UI.

What's next for TreeDegree

We plan to add transcript uploads so the graph can automatically show what a student has unlocked. We also want to support graduation planning, what-if scenarios, and advisor-style views. The goal is to make TreeDegree a true navigation system for academic paths.

Built With

• css
• express.js
• html
• javascript
• node.js
• openaiapi
• python
• react
• tailwind
• typescript
• vite