UofA-Hours

The office hour search engine for the UofA
Professors can easily add their office hours for their classes
Students can use their professor's name or class' name to locate the location and time of office hours
Students can highlight their office hours and save them on their machine

Inspiration

The importance of seeking out help from our professors when completing homework assignments, studying for exams, and reviewing the material has been lost on the students at the UofA. Nevertheless, identifying exactly when one’s professors are free can be a tedious and time-consuming task. Some professors post their office hours in the syllabus, others use class websites, and a handful simply write it on the whiteboard in class. Professors also may not have their schedule determined by the beginning of the semester and therefore may leave their hours as TBD, making it even harder for students to seek extra help from their teachers.

Our group proposed a solution: what if professors could all post their office hours in one place? Students could either search for their professor’s or class’s name and find all this information immediately. Students could then highlight and save the hours of their professors on their machine and could have a constant reference for this information.

This is exactly what we built.

Our prototype implements all of these features. We are currently LIVE at uofahours.herokuapp.com. We also have the domain http://www.uofahours.tech/.

What it does

UofA Hours is a website where professors can easily publish their office hours to the student body. The website features their name, classes, and office location for every class they publish. Students are then able to “highlight” these office hours and save them locally on their machine for future reference.

How we built it

We used a combination of ES6 JavaScript, HTML, and CSS for the front end, MongoDB and Node.js for the backend.

What we learned

During the process of building UofA Hours, we learned: How to store, search, and retrieve from a MongoDB database Use promises and asynchronous functions in web applications. Use Github effectively as we consistently created and maintained branches of our work. How to register a domain name and how to publish our work.

As a bonus, we picked up some lessons on good design practices which make our code run better and easier to maintain.