Prologue

We were the clueless freshmen at our NSC. The ones that had little to no knowledge about the classes that were offered here at A&M and the difficulty of the courses and the differences between the quality of professors. A website such as this would have been the perfect addition to improving the quality of our NSC and lowering our stress levels during this new time



Description

This app is tailor-made for incoming freshmen engineers to decide what schedule they want for their mandatory courses during their fall semester. It works to provide every piece of information that any incoming Aggie would need to become an academic weapon at the prestigious institution of Texas A&M.



The How

There is a lot that went into this project. Firstly, we created our own database by browsing through the different class sections that incoming freshmen engineering courses have on the Howdy Portal. Then, we needed to parse through this database to match the input from the student to the list. After this, we create cards that display the student's schedules - the sections and the information about the professor they chose. Finally, we created the rest of the website; the about, the home, and the graphs section. Our about included all the pertinent information relating to the developers and crediting the websites where we got all our information. The home tab was composed of our user reviews, and a carousel displaying the local landmarks at A&M. Finally, our graphs tab displays the G.P.A distributions of the 5 courses that the students can select from.



Obstacles and Solutions

Some challenges that we ran into were learning HTML, Javascript, and CSS in one night. Our team was composed of beginner to entry-level programmers who had little to no knowledge about creating a website. After we created a skeleton of a website that we were satisfied with, we had to learn how to parse through a CVS file through javascript. On top of learning all of this we also implement our own personal database that was based on the class search option under the howdy portal. We had to manually create this database which took some time. Finally, to make our website more aesthetically pleasing we looked for certain graphical elements that we could implement such as a carousel, buttons, hyperlinks, and other forms that could make our program more user-friendly.



Accomplishments

We were proud to be able to create a website that from our perspective actually solves a real-life problem for incoming Aggies. We accomplished creating the very first database that we manually imported from the howdy portal website. We were also proud to create a functioning website from scratch. A website that consisted of multiple tabs that work in conjunction to help the user with their life. We also liked the professional look of our website and believed it was synonymous with other such websites that are out there such as the registration sheet on the Howdy portal. Most importantly, we were proud to be able to do all of this under 24 hours - a deadline that we have never faced before.



Learning Outcomes

We enhanced our knowledge and expertise in 3 new programming languages and created a website that we are proud to make public. We learned how to work under a time crunch on a collaborative project. We learned that a lot more is possible in under 24 hours than we ever thought possible. For example, a lot of unplanned additions were made once we developed certain aspects of our project. Additions that made our website look more advanced than we foresaw.



Future goals

We believe that we can take this project to a much larger scale and have it represent the whole student population. We can make this possible by employing a more efficient method of importing the data that is on the registration site of the Howdy portal or working with a larger team in a larger time frame so the database is generated more easily. Either one of these approaches would make it possible to make our project scalable.



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