Inspiration
UMass Lowell's Student Information System (SiS) is infamous among students, and teachers, for it's backwards-thinking user interface. Actions like selecting courses, finding professors, and checking grades are all treated the same: as a transaction. As a result, the shopping cart inspired database system has an extremely high learning curve, and leaves most newcomers utterly lost without the required freshman training. We sought not to fix this problem at the Hawkathon, but instead create a better, more tolerable alternative.
What it does
The amount of work necessary to completely integrate the entirety of SiS is immense and definitely a part of our future plans. For our current model, we have built on some of its most frustrating features. For example, when looking for grades at the end of a semester, students have to go through a wide array of selections and drop down menus to get this information. With MySiSPal this information is only a single word text message away. The power of MySiSPal is truly realized in the fact that any cell phone, as long as it has texting capabilities, is able to use it.
How we built it
The result of our work at the Hawkathon is prototype which consists of a website (www.mysispal.com aka 50.17.160.160) that allows users to sign up with their emails, and eventually their SiS passwords, which are stored along with the scraped text grades (upon request from our API but not the Twilio API).
What we learned
Throughout our time at the Hawkathon, we learned how to use Twilio's texting capabilities to its full extent, and also had a chance to work with AWS, thought it was not a favorite. In addition, we each gained experience working with both front-end and back-end procedures.
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