Inspiration: We got inspired by the lack of innovation on our current schedule creating, students must sort through 120 pages of classes to look at their classes which leads many students to just get lazy and take whichever random classes they get on course registration date. This does not seem like a big issue but students ending up in random classes leads to higher dropout rate as they are not satisfied with their class and prefer not taking it. JacScheduleMaker is convenient and efficient, it will be used by every student
What it does: AI sorts through a pdf of the classes available and then prompts a user to enter which classes they want in their schedule, specifying priority in classes and which level of a class they want to take, level 3 french, english 101, etc. It then instantly creates a schedule avoding overlap and all that is left is for you to add the classes on registration day.
How we built it: We create a wordpress page as the general U.I for our website and then we trained a gpt to be able to sort through and analyze the pdf correctly. Then we linked the gpt to this page so users would be redirected to it after reading the website.
Challenges we ran into: We have no previous experience with python or APIs, this led to an incredible amount of obstacles. We preferably would have integrated an ai plug in on wordpress **which would have made this work however after hours we could not get it to work. Once that could not work we attempted **vs code however with no knowledge of python or Flask we attempted to figure it out but again after hours and staying up all night it was too much to troubleshoot for us. Our AI currently does not work unless you have a subscription the gpt 4, as that is what allows us to train our AI for this use case, this is obviously a fatal flaw and something we needed to but could not manage to fix.
Accomplishments that we're proud of: I do not think any of us are proud of much besides the fact that we attempted to do this for so long regardless of consistent failure over the span of 20 hours.
What we learned: We learned that integrating AI into websites is far from simple for people with no experience and sometimes you need external help to figure something out. However the time spent trying and failing at this will stick with us and help us excel at future hackathons and be more prepared.
What's next for JacScheduleMaker: If we can properly integrate the API or the wordpress plug in into our website we *fully believe that our application would be used by every single JAC student and afterwards by other schools. It is simply far too convenient, effecient and effective. It may be simple but often times the simple things are the most useful and this is one of those times, AI is perfect for this job as it can process data, understand personal user requests such as class preferences, it can suggest complimentary courses or clubs and it will continue learning as it is being used.
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