BU Hub Course Planner

BU Hub Course Planner project image: View List of Classes and Hub Units in Each Plan — View List of Classes and Hub Units in Each Plan

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Overview

The BU Hub Course Planner is a web application designed to simplify class scheduling for Boston University students. The application helps users find the minimum number of classes required to fulfill all BU Hub requirements. This addresses a practical variation of the set cover problem, where an algorithm determines the smallest subset of classes that collectively satisfy all required Hub units. Thanks to the specific parameters of this problem, the application achieves an optimal or near-optimal solution in O(n²) time, and often in O(n) time for typical cases.

This project was developed as the final assignment for the Full-Stack Application Design and Development class at BU. It leverages the Django framework for both frontend and backend. Course data was sourced directly from the BU course catalog using a combination of Web and API scraping.

Key Features

Optimal Course Selection: An algorithm finds the minimum number of classes needed to fulfill all BU Hub requirements.
Customizable Plans: Users can exclude specific classes from their schedules or mark certain requirements as already fulfilled.
User Account Management:
- Registration and Login: Secure account creation and authentication.
- Profile Updates: Users can update their profile details and change passwords after registration.

Technical Details

Framework: Built with Django, providing a robust and scalable structure for handling user interactions, authentication, and course planning algorithms.
Web/API Scraping: Used a combination of Web and API scraping to extract and parse relevant course data from the BU course catalog.
Set Cover Problem Optimization: Implemented an efficient algorithm to minimize the number of classes required to cover all Hub requirements, achieving near-optimal results within reasonable computational bounds.
User Experience: Designed intuitive features for managing schedules, including the ability to exclude courses and generate schedules that take into account current progress.

Development Context

The BU Hub Course Planner was developed for class as a final web development project. It is meant to be a practical tool for BU students that also helped me explore full-stack web development concepts. The project combines algorithm design, data scraping, and web development into a cohesive CRUD application, showcasing skills in various web development aspects.