Inspiration
The umass spire website was the first and foremost inspiration for this project of ours. The original college website - spire is used for a variety of college services such as looking at current schedule, choosing classes, viewing all graduation requirements - college requirements as well as general education requirements. Original Spire website: link
What it does
This project works to provide a better interface for the original umass spire system - which is like the lifeline of the umass system, essential for choosing the classes one takes next semester. It also emphasizes on how one has various tasks and holds to take care of before registration for classes. Our project - outspire not provides the courses one must take to complete the graduation requirements according to one's major, but also creates automated suggestions for courses.
How we built it
We first built a database in the google spreadsheets. This database stored information of all the courses offered my the college, their course numbers, subject names, topics, and even pre-requisites. Eventually we imported this database into Java and then used it to make the back-end of our website. This information helped us to compare inputs and extract data easily. We employed HTML and CSS to cover the front-end of the website. We also gave our website a more "user-friendly" appearance.
Challenges we ran into
Challenges are an integral part of our life. Once we overcome a challenge it not only makes us more confident about ourselves and boosts our knowledge, but also improves our problem-solving and thinking skills. Over the course of the development of the project we faced various troubles. Sometimes, we got stuck on certain issues and did not know how to proceed. For example, we did not know how to merge HTML and Java in the program. So, we sought for help from the mentors. There was a point when we felt that our project is very hard and not feasible to be completed with such less knowledge and very little time. However, we got ourselves together and worked to achieve our goal. We thus attempted to target a smaller version of the project with only a limited number of majors.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are really proud of the fact that we could work this well as a group. For some of us this was our very first hackathon and we were still able to cover various obstacles. Also, the fact that none of us was very good with the server side protocol yet, we were able to publish this site is a great accomplishment.
What we learned
We learned a great deal during the course of this Hackathon. With the help of the mentors during the event, we got many of our issues solved and understood key concepts. The introduction to the server side protocols was probably one of the best things that we could learn and do something with. Alongside the mentor, teammates were also very helpful and many of us got to learn different things from each other. Surprisingly, not everything we learned were technical skills. We also got to learn personal skills and get to experience good work ethics. So, along with technical knowledge we also learned how to manage time effectively and work as a group, and learned good leadership skills to name a few.
What's next for outspire
Currently, outspire is a miniature version of our anticipated project. We see our project being helpful and serving the college community in the future. As of now, our project has only a limited number of majors. In the future, we plan to expand on this and include all majors offered my the institution. We also plan on adding a grade based course suggester. Basically, the user will be asked to input their grades for each course. Based on their grades they will be suggested to move on to the next course, to move to an intermediate preparatory course, or repeat the course. We also plan to keep changing and improving the interface for our webpage.
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