A React and NodeJS-based software that pulls students’ information for capstone projects from inputted CSV’s and helps the user organize teams based on project needs for the upcoming semester. After team assignments are done, the software outputs a new master CSV with the new teams.
Sponsored by: PSU Learning Factory
Team Members
Michelle Vu Lukas Jones Daniel Stebbins Jiwoong Jeon Sirui Qi Saksham Arora Yuan Tian
Instructor: Al Verbanac
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Project Summary
Overview
Every semester at Penn State, approximately 500-700 engineering students take their capstone course to graduate. Each of these students must be sorted into teams with a balanced number of team members. The students’ majors must also be balanced with regard to the needs of the project. Current tools to sort students are inefficient and cost the Learning Factory Director upwards of an entire 40-hour week of work. Our team was tasked with creating an application that can streamline the process of sorting students into projects, as well as creating a dashboard that can display student statistics.
Objectives
– Increase efficiency for creating capstone teams based on project needs.
– Create a project dashboard to display statistics on projects.
– Analyze project teams and identify teams with imbalances relative to the assigned project’s preferred majors.
– Recommend new projects to switch students into based on individual student preferences.
– Update the database to reflect changes and export the changes to a CSV.
Approach
– Met with the Director of the Learning Factory to identify and analyze issues with current tools.
– Brainstormed ideas for features and functionality.
– Built prototype dashboard to test aesthetic design using Figma.
– Created a NodeJS script to import CSV files to a MySQL database.
– Designed front-end GUI using React based on Figma design.
Outcomes
– Our database greatly speeds up the process of looking for team data compared to the disorganized input CSVs.
– Helpful summaries such as the count of unassigned students and teams not meeting specifications stop the Director from searching for which changes need to be made.
– Our real-time visual GUI for swapping students removes the need to load the updated data into a PDF to see changes.
– All of these changes will make team assignments far more efficient in future semesters.
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