Mockle

Inspiration

With the inevitably busy schedule of a college or university student, we all feel that it can be really stressful and nerve-wracking for some students to even start planning ahead for their school endeavors. We can emphasize with this, as we've all been there once. One of the most common complaints that we received, especially nearing registration period, was the lack of efficient methods to organize their "mock" schedule, or in other words a suggested template for their schedule. Most of the time, it will take a fairly long time to organize an ideal schedule (or multiple!) and it can be especially heartbreaking when it doesn't pass through the system either. That's why we wanted to help simplify this arduous process: if we can't guarantee a mock schedule to pass, we can definitely facilitate the process of creating mock schedule so they have more potential to create more.

What it does

Our invention is a website that in its core will not only automatically input manual data to a virtual schedule (making the process smoother and faster) but it helps with suggesting recommended teachers based on program, school attended, and semester #. The user will simply need to click on one of the recommended teacher(s) based on their prior selections and it'll automatically appear on the schedule! That way, it gives a clean visual of how the general gist of a schedule will look like instead of simply trying to eyeball a list of courses. Additionally, the invention will flag any courses conflicting with another added one, so one will know exactly what combination of courses are available to them at all times.

How we built it

As the framework is majorly based on a website, the majority of the building was done by HTML and Javascript enhancing and modifying the HTML. To facilitate the process, the team got separated into 2 groups: 1 focusing on Javascript and another 1 focusing on HTML (via Atom platform). In the end, we combined our two snippets of code and integrated them together to create the final product.

Challenges we ran into

We came into this hackathon with only a limited grasp of coding and programming, so it was a challenge getting started. A good amount of time was well spent on leaning the basic concepts of both HTML and Javascript in order to have enough of a platform to kickstart our idea. Once we got rolling though, we simultaneously formed the basic template for our app and picked up new strategies in Javascript and HTML in the process.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Considering the limited amount of time, we were pretty proud with our finalized demo for our mock schedule. This is personally made more impressive when factoring our limited programming experience (although a fun challenge) There's still plenty of room for improvement, but we feel especially proud of having a tangible project to be able to realistically pitch our plan.

What I learned

During this hackathon, we learned viable and core skills in programming. This was not only solely because of the experience hacking in a professional environment, but also because of the numerous workshops that aided us throughout the process. Most importantly, we all solidified our team skills, whether it be delegating tasks or brainstorming effectively together.

What's next for Mockle

The current version of Mockle, our invention, is only at its infancy. We plan on not only improving its features to sort teacher suggestions more independently (ex: filters, links to ratemyteacher, etc.) but eventually we also plan to pair up with college institutions so we obtain a more reliable database for teachers and classes.

Built With

• atom
• html5
• javascript