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Project Link: cmpt-276-courseproject.herokuapp.com/

PROJECT PROPOSAL: “SFU COURSE PLANNER”

Abstract

The current SFU course selection system is very unintuitive, it is very time consuming to find courses that are required for our degree. Moreover, it takes a while for the server to output the results during course-searching process. To look up all courses, we have only lists that have the courses sorted in alphanumeric order. We propose the “SFU Course Planner” app that will simplify this process and become an ‘all on one’ app. The aim is to provide lookup tables with built in sort features that more easily allows students to plan courses. Our app may also create multiple portfolios, which may be desired over goSFU’s way of letting you plan courses.

Project Scope

Our main feature is to provide a better lookup system for courses. The app will take information from SFU API’s and stores it in our database. This data will be used on our lookup tables and create separate pages for detailed information about each course. These tables can be sorted in alphanumeric, WQB, subjects, year, etc.. We will then allow students to create portfolios from the information in our database. There will be a user login feature, so that students can save portfolios of the courses they want to keep track of, but users can also download the portfolios whether or not they are logged in.

There may also be ‘comment’ features to allow students to comment on courses and rate professors (possibly links to various professors through rateMyProf or something similar). Students will also be able to check the required courses they still need to take to finish their degrees and see their semester schedule as they are selecting courses. We will possibly also allow students to compare schedules with each other and auto-generate pages for students to get information about course textbook and estimated cost of the course. On top of that there will be a feature to recommend students on what their next courses should be. The recommendation may be generated from the students’ prerequisite or based on the course they have taken. Lastly, we can have various links to resources that are useful for course selection.

Furthermore, we will create a simulated semester schedule for chosen courses. This will enable students to graphically see what their daily schedule will be like before putting all the courses into the cart. This simulation will be able to warn the student of any course conflicts. For the User Interface, we might either have a simple lookup table for the course and a table with a lot of links to other information (textbook, professor, comments, etc) regarding a specific course. For the search input UI, we will have the UI that looks like the UI from goSFU, but there will also be another search UI that is made in the assumption that it will be better/more intuitive than the UI from goSFU.

Project Deliverables and Beneficiaries

At the end of the project we hope to have a website with the features mentioned in the project scope. We will use agile methodologies for this project, possibly adding extra features as we go along. Access to the system is made public but students need to sign up to use certain feature such as making comments regarding the course and saving their portfolios. The application is designed especially for SFU students. SFU students will benefit from this project as it provides a quicker, more intuitive solution for students to search for course information and plan their term. By combining several features from app such as goSFU and rateMyProf, students will be able to save time to build a perfect schedule for themselves.