Two weeks ago, University of Connecticut student Eric Asante’s course scheduler program was made the official course scheduler for all UConn students.
The website can be accessed through the domain https://coursescheduler.engr.uconn.edu/, but only when on UConn’s Wi-Fi network. Asante is working on making the site accessible on public networks so that students can access it from their homes.
Upon opening the website, students must input the term and campus for where they are looking for classes — which they can do by searching up the class code or department code. There is also a feature to add personal breaks during their schedule. Students can select up to eight classes and/or personal breaks before hitting the Schedule button to find all possible schedules.
Once a class is added, students can look at the professors/sections view, by clicking on the blue informational sign, and lock in certain professors whose sections they want to be in. Students can also lock certain sections in the schedule view, by clicking any one of the schedules generated.
Asante also added three links students could use: links to make an appointment with a career coach, to make an advisor appointment and to learn more about the Writing and Qualitative Learning centers.
When the previous course scheduler students used was discontinued, Asante thought creating a course scheduler was the best solution to this problem.
“I just tried to see if there was a solution, and that was the solution,” Asante said.
According to Asante, a seventh-semester computer science major, the project took him a “good months’ worth of time over the span of two semesters.” He worked on the first version of the scheduler during spring break last year. The second version was worked on during the summer and fall of 2024, which he deployed later that semester through a LinkedIn post.
Asante used a guest portal on Student Admin to gain access to all the classes and wrote a custom program in C Sharp that generated all possible schedules.
When asked about how he got the website to become UConn’s official course scheduler, Asante said he reached out to different faculty and professors on how to affiliate his website. He eventually got in touch with UConn’s web department and showed them version two of the course builder.
“I showed them version two of the deployed app, and I guess they thought it was cool, and it had potential,” Asante said. “And then I went through the whole entire deployment process with them. It was a good three-week process, because I had to make sure the website worked for, like, branding purposes and things of that nature.”
In terms of site traffic, Asante can’t access the data for the UConn link, but he said the GitHub domain — “the sidekick domain” — has seen over five thousand schedules generated in the last two weeks. Asante assumes at least one thousand people have used the site, and a slightly larger number have used the UConn domain.
Asante said he has done “the most I alone could probably push it,” and has been talking to professors in the computer science department about making this website into a senior design project so that someone else can iterate upon his work.
Although Asante was the main developer on the project, he couldn’t do it without the advice from his friends.
“One of the [website’s] mottos is ‘for students, by students,’ so I would say there was a lot of different people that gave me tips, improvements and suggestions along the process,” Asante said.
congrats!