UNC CS Encyclopedia

website

Inspiration

We are inspired by a web game called Akinator which can tell what the user thinks after several rounds of interactive QA. As the CS department grows larger, it becomes harder for CS students to form close-knit connections with each other and with professors. We hope to create a simple game that makes fun and promotes a close-knit CS community at the same time.

What it does

Before the game, users should keep one UNC professor in mind.

Once beginning the game, users are directed to answer several multiple-choice questions. Our “thought-reading” Encyclopedia is (hopefully) able to guess who is the professor in your mind!

After several rounds of the game, we hope to help Tar Heels to familiarize themselves with our CS professors (their fun facts, roles, research interests, etc.).

How we built it

We made a database that contains the information of 51 current UNC CS professors, including their title, age, gender, etc. Each time the player answers our question, we can narrow down the professor list. Step by step, the one and only correct professor will remain.

Challenges we ran into

First of all, we had a hard time designing a good-looking website that doesn’t repel people at first. We don’t know a lot about all the professors ourselves, so collecting comprehensive and accurate data was a lot of work.

What's next for UNC CS Encyclopedia

If more and more people play our game, we can collect more data about the professors. Also, we can add more attributes to classify the professors to make our guess faster and more precise.