2023 • Creator

Degree Planner

Plan your degree like you plan your code.

Visual

Flowchart

Auto

Dependencies

Overview

Degree Planner is an interactive visualization tool that transforms your degree requirements into a flowchart. See prerequisites at a glance, plan your semesters visually, and never miss a required course again.

The Problem

University degree requirements are complex webs of prerequisites, corequisites, and elective categories. Students typically track this in spreadsheets or paper, leading to missed requirements, suboptimal course sequences, and delayed graduations.

Tech Stack

TypeScriptSvelteGraph Visualization

The Approach

1

Graph Visualization

Represented curriculum as a directed acyclic graph. Courses are nodes, prerequisites are edges. The visual immediately reveals bottlenecks and dependencies.

2

Interactive Planning

Drag and drop courses into semester buckets. The system validates prerequisites and warns about conflicts in real-time.

3

Svelte for Reactivity

Needed snappy updates as users manipulate their plans. Svelte's reactivity model made this trivial.

Challenges

Curriculum Data

No API for degree requirements. Had to scrape and structure data from PDF catalogs.

Layout Algorithm

Automatically laying out a DAG to minimize edge crossings is NP-hard. Implemented a heuristic that works well for typical curricula.

Outcomes

  • Adopted by CS students at AUI for degree planning
  • Reduced advisor meetings for "what should I take next" questions
  • Template available for other universities to customize

Role

Creator

Duration

2 months

Year

2023

Stack

3 technologies