The Graphical Assistant for Prerequisite Enrollment (GrAPE) is a course planning tool for UC San Diego students. The name is inspired by CAPE, the Course And Professor Evaluations which students submit at the end of every quarter. GrAPE helps students navigate the complex prerequisites of each course in the catalog by presenting them in a graphical format.
Check it out here! coursegrapher.app
Background
When I was planning my courses as a first-year student at UC San Diego, I found it difficult to navigate the school's online catalog. The catalog contains a lot of information about each course, particularly prerequisites (the other courses you need to take before you can enroll in a certain one), but that information was all buried within large blocks of text. It was hard to keep track of what courses I needed to take, and in what order, to satisfy my graduation requirements.
I knew that my experience must not be unique, as thousands of new students face a similar challenge every year at UCSD, so I thought of ways to improve the process and decided that better data visualization could help. Thus, over months of work, I created GrAPE to help us navigate these course prerequisites more easily.
Developing this project has been a good exercise in languages and algorithms, especially graph algorithms, as well as data visualization and user experience design. I could not have done it without taking some great computer science courses and learning web-development skills as a member of Triton Software Engineering. There are more features which I plan to continue working on in the near future.
For a more in-depth writeup of how GrAPE works, see the About page at coursegrapher.app/about.