ScreenshotImagine you’re making a class schedule in Bear Tracks.
After scouring the search function while swapping in and out classes, you’re almost done and need to enroll in your last “required” course. You find the it, add it to the Schedule Builder and then — “scheduling conflict.”
You have no choice: you have to go back, drop the courses you’re already enrolled in and start all over again.
A tedious procedure many University of Alberta students have encountered, especially those in their first or second year where the selection of required courses and electives can be overwhelming.
It’s one of the reasons why third-year computer engineering students Andrew Hoskins and Ross Anderson created “Winston,” a schedule-planning companion turtle that alleviates headaches when building arduous class schedules.
“This would’ve been something we wish we would have had,” Hoskins said, looking back at how Winston could have been used in his first year of engineering at the U of A. “You run into the problem of where you’re doing four or five courses and you run into the schedule conflict so you have to go all the way back, move them all and try again … it takes a long time just to remove those classes.”
Winston utilizes a more “robust” course search when compared to Bear Tracks, the two said, while offering a set of preferences that could make schedule building a bit easier.
Like to sleep in? After you select a course from the menu, Winston can block off all morning classes so you can snooze through those 8 a.m. labs. Same goes for students who like to wake up early and finish their classes so they can leave campus by 4 p.m. Winston users can also toggle whether or not they prefer marathons, a string of consecutive classes in a row, and if they would consider night classes if a course was offered during a late time slot.
After the user selects their courses and preferences, Winston generates a series of possible schedules with all class combinations, which are ranked to the user’s liking.
The sluggishness of Bear Tracks and the lack of generating schedules without adding it to the builder was something the two wanted to bring to Winston, Anderson said.
“Those two things make it slow and frustrating at times,” he said. “Bear Tracks does a good job of showing you the schedule when you have it and enrolling … but the course search was something we wanted to improve on and the class (schedule) generation is something that it didn’t support.”
The project began last fall, where the two were hashing out ideas on “cool stuff we wanted to make,” Hoskins said.
They gathered resources for Winston from a former computer engineering student who used U of A course data in one of their class projects. A series of Winston prototypes were developed and polished so the website would be fully functional when class registration for the Fall 2015 semester opened.
Since Winston’s launch on March 22, heywinston.com has attracted 1,500 unique visitors who have generated about 2,000 class schedules combined.
Feedback from Winston users suggest that Anderson and Hoskins implement more support for electives, as the tool asks the user to select all elective courses at once, as opposed to ranking schedules purely on best possible fit.
Anderson and Hoskins are also currently working on an advanced search function, based on descriptions and keywords, instead of just by course name and number.
Anderson, who is currently on a work term with IBM in Toronto, and Hoskins, who is stationed in Cochrane at Dynastream Innovations, agreed that their experiences in labs and critical assignments at the U of A have allowed them to develop projects like Winston and hopefully in future endeavours in the computing and software industry.
But for now, they said they hope Winston, its image and “funny name” will be something that’s memorable for students whenever they create their class schedules beyond this semester.
“For now, our main objective is to make it a standalone product,” Hoskins said.
“We don’t know what the university will do or if they will respond. We just want to make it as usable as possible for a big group of students if we can.”
