1. Brett Hlavinka and Chris Aikens

2. Imagine…  You’re a CSCE Junior about to start upper-level courses  You’re frustrated with howdy and its uselessness  You don’t want to pay simply to look up professor reviews  You want to find courses you have an interest in

3. Sources of Information  Course information is spread across many sources howdy ○ Course schedules myEdu (formerly PickaProf) ○ Grade distributions and reviews CS Department website ○ Course descriptions

4. Search Problems  Searching through courses is limited howdy ○ Limit results with advanced search filters myEdu (formerly PickaProf) ○ Course number or professor’s name CS Department website ○ No searching

5. Motivation  Problem: Cannot easily determine which courses you want to take  Solution: A consolidated, searchable website for CS courses View course schedules Search over descriptions and reviews Be free of charge  Enter Computer Science Search (CSS)

6. Related Work  MyEdu Grade distributions and professor ratings/reviews Starting at $10 a year

7. Related Work  Stanford’s Course Rank Search, Review, Schedule, and Plan Can be adopted by other universities

8. Related Work  AgProfessors.com Course/professor grade distributions and reviews Texas A&M specific (and free of charge)

9. Related Work  Summary All related works incorporated good ideas ○ Searching ○ Reviews ○ Course Descriptions Try to integrate related works and our own ideas  Idea: make a course search site specific to Texas A&M that helps students build their schedule Should be easy to use and allow students to retrieve information

10. Methods Used  Scope: make the site CSCE only with static content to start Collected course info MyEdu reviews as base (plus some original)  Store various fields relevant to courses in an XML file  Use Digester to parse the XML file  Use Lucene to allow the user to search over courses and reviews

11. Demo  Search for Course Number 470  Search for Name Hurley  Search for Time MWF  Search for All “Database”  Search for All “Aggies Roolz”  Browse by Number  Browse by Prof

12. Scenario 1  Information need: retrieve relevant information for taking CSCE – 410  AgProfessors: Search finds course and gives grade distributions  MyEdu: Search finds course and tells grade distributions and has professor reviews  CSS: Search finds course and gives general information about the course

13. Scenario 2  Information need: retrieve relevant courses to the search “scheduling and memory allocation” Try to find course that covers this material Hope to find CSCE – 410  AgProfessors and MyEdu fall short here  This is the reason behind CSS The search returns CSCE – 410

14. Evaluation  All the searchable sites have useful information, the user needs to decide their information need Grade Distributions Professor Reviews Course Scheduling/Reviews  CSS was made to find courses from a general search  We did not expect the other sites to perform well in this area

15. Analysis  Student values a site that is essentially all in one package  Stanford’s Course Rank has all the features that any student would need when constructing a course schedule Search capability Reviews Built in scheduling Planning

16. Conclusions  There is an obvious absence of searchable course listings CSS is a site designed for finding courses you want CSS could be further developed to implement more features ○ Writing reviews ○ Grade distributions ○ Course recommendations

17. Conclusions  Information should be consolidated CSS is a consolidated site, combining course listings with searchable descriptions and reviews Reduces time retrieving information, as well as the hassle of doing so

18. Questions?

19. Thank You