VTCourseNav

VTCourseNav is the ultimate tool for VT students to streamline their academic journey. Our site simplifies course planning by visualizing prerequisites, helping you map out your path to graduation.

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VTCourseNav

Inspiration

VTCourseNav was inspired by the need for a clearer and more organized way for Virginia Tech students to navigate their academic journey. We wanted to create a tool that simplifies the complex process of planning course prerequisites and helps students achieve their graduation goals with confidence.

What It Does

VTCourseNav is a website designed to streamline course planning for VT students. It visualizes prerequisite chains and enables users to map out their path to graduation with ease. By providing a clear overview of course sequences, it helps students make informed decisions about their academic trajectory.

How We Built It

We developed VTCourseNav using Selenium, BeautifulSoup, Python, HTML, CSS, JavaScript. We used Selenium and Beautiful Soup to scrape Virginia Tech's undergraduate catalog and aggregated the data in JSON files. The platform integrates course data from those files and utilizes visual representations to show prerequisite relationships. Our team worked collaboratively to design an intuitive user interface and ensure accurate data handling.

Challenges We Ran Into

During development, we encountered several challenges, including:

  • Dealing with the Virginia Tech course catalog's HTML and inconsistent prerequisite formatting when scraping the courses.
  • Building a disjunctive normal form algorithm to parse the prerequisite section of the courses.
  • Creating an intuitive visualization for complex prerequisite chains.
  • Ensuring the platform's performance while dealing with data at scale.

Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

  • Successfully creating a functional prototype that accurately visualizes prerequisite paths.
  • Designing a user-friendly interface that simplifies complex academic planning.
  • Overcoming data integration challenges to deliver a seamless user experience.

What We Learned

Through this project, we gained valuable insights into:

  • The importance of clear data visualization in academic planning.
  • Techniques for handling and processing large datasets.
  • The need for user-centric design to enhance the usability of educational tools.

What's Next for VTCourseNav

Moving forward, we plan to:

  • Expand the platform to include additional features, such as personalized recommendations and academic progress tracking.
  • Create a custom 4 year plan for every major that highlights paths based on preferences.
  • Gather user feedback to continuously improve and refine the platform.
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