Overview:
Course Planner V2.0 is a web application built for the Swarthmore College community to simplify and improve the class scheduling process. The platform allows students to browse, plan, and organize their course selections more efficiently through an intuitive and responsive interface.
Inspiration:
This project arose due to the struggle I personally face each semester when planning my classes. Swarthmore provides basic search and filtering on the Tri College Course Catalog, however you can see how unintuitive and clunky the process is. Each search takes you to a brand new page and you must navigate backwards in order to execute additional searches. This slow and tedious process forced me and many other students at Swarthmore to create manual spreadsheets to track iterations of semester schedules. A total waste of time.
After hearing how many people struggled with this problem, a few SCCS members and I worked together to build this planner. It allows students to create multiple iterations of a schedule, view them as lists or in a calendar, and export to an ICS for import into any calendar app.
Outcomes:
- Optimized performance: Reduced total API response time by over 10× through improved route handling and database query efficiency.
- User growth: Helped achieve a 25% adoption rate among students, projected to reach 50% through marketing and continuous iteration.
- Continuous deployment: Integrated user feedback rapidly through automated deployment cycles, ensuring consistent improvements across devices.
Tech Stack:
TypeScript, React, Node.js, Express, PostgreSQL, Docker, and Prisma.