A visual Map of courses offered at Tufts University. Freshman year hackathon project.
2/24/13 - Tufts Univeristy 2013 Hackathon
8/2/13 - Decided to put this on Github. Project is stil ongoing. Progress has stalled, but Teddy is learning rails at a General Assembly's Web Development Immersive, and we'll attack the problem again in the fall with a greater range of tools.
10/30/15 - That didn't happen =). Oh well. Here's a screenshot of what we built anyways.
This project was the result of the collaboration of Seth Drew, Teddy Cleveland, and I at Tufts University's annual hackathon, sponsored by Evernote.
I came up with this idea because I'm sort of crazy in that I like to plan things way ahead, with full cognizance that plans change. In that way, it's a waste of time, but it relaxes me to have some insight into where I'm headed at any particular point in time.
Tufts issues "The Bulletin" which is a list of majors and their respective required courses. I would open the bulletin in one hand, the course offerings manual in the other, and write down on a third sheet of paper the courses I might take in coming semesters. It quickly occurred to me this wasn't an efficient way of going about this. With my first hackathon coming up, I decided this was a worthy problem to solve.
Tufts calendar tool, put together by a hacker from before our time, was called RaptorAttack, and we felt this was more of a planning than attacking app, so we called it RaptorScheme. I built the HTML, CSS, Jquery animations, and graphics. Seth helped build a parser in ruby of an existing database of courses Tufts had, and Teddy chugged away at CodeAcademy's Javascript tutorials before converting the parsed data into javascript objects. Seth and I collaborated on retooling a d3.js implementation to our needs and we put it all together for a fairly successful demo 25 hours after we started. It was a bunch of fun.