Inspiration
Scheduling Gen-Eds is always a daunting task for students. It certainly was for us! And since there were so many resources spread out across the internet, we saw potential in a tool that could help simplify this process.
What it does
Generates a gened plan based on your interests. It also ranks courses based on credit areas and difficulty, as determined by other Penn State Students!
How we built it
We began by scraping the PSU Bulletins website for the list of Gen-Eds. After this, we matched courses to the interests of users. We then progressed to analyzing the overall difficulty of these recommended courses by performing a sentiment analysis on comments left by real Penn State Students and Alumni!
Challenges we ran into
We had challenges while converting the course data from one type to another(csv to dataframe to database to json). Moreover, implementing AI recommendation system for user interests was tricky. Moreover, animating UI elements proved to be quite a challenge.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were proud of the data conversion and the implementation of NLP on websites and the AI algorithm to match courses to interests.
What we learned
We learned a lot about how different databases work, AI and NLP API's, Java Swing capabilities and limitations and how to integrate java and python code.
What's next for GenEZ
For future scaling, we will implement complete planning for Major and Minor courses with the customizability of time to graduate, credit limit, difficulty and more. This will make planning out degrees far easier and help reduce the dependency on academic advisors who are usually quite busy.
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