For HackED 2020, our group has decided to address a common problem in our project, UofA Room Seeker. As university students, we've all faced the difficulty of searching for an unoccupied space on campus. Finding a spot is virtually impossible during the daytime, whether in Solarium at ETLC, at the food court in SUB, or on the 2nd floor of Cameron library. From this experience, we aimed to expand our search beyond these common locations, to potentially unoccupied classrooms on campus ~ which is where UofA Room Seeker comes in. Our project intends on providing (likely) available lecture halls for occupation, given a user's desired times and buildings.
Since the U of A has public listings of every course offered, and the locations and times that each class has a lecture/lab/seminar, we can scrape the U of A course catalog to learn when every room is occupied with a class on north campus. From there, we know that any other time where a given classroom isn't occupied will likely be empty. (Ignoring clubs, people already there, etc) In addition, we have been developing a web app with Django to make it accessible on browser or mobile. Simply go to the site, put in your desired time and get a list of every room that is available.
Since only one team member is familiar with Django, there has been some difficulty for the rest of us to catch up and help contribute for that particular aspect. Regardless, our group members have all worked significantly on our project; each respective to their own skillset and level.
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