Engineering seniors create interactive class scheduling tool

For seniors Kiran Ryali and Jon Hughes (computer science), and Scott Wilson (electrical and computer engineering), scheduling can sometimes be a pain in the class. As part of their Technology & Entrepreneurship Senior Design course, they decided to do something about it.

Result: Classwhole, a socially interactive class scheduling system. With Classwhole, students planning their next semester’s schedules can enter their desired courses and drag and drop potential class meeting times around an interactive calendar. While their shifting their times for an optimal schedule, they can also see which other Classwhole users have opted for the same courses.

“The project started out just being a pure schedule, but as we started working on it, we realized we could improve some things,” said the team.

Considering additional functionality, the team realized that they could introduce the ability to drag and drop classes around a calendar view, building new schedules on the fly, rather than presenting the user with potentially dozens of permutations of their potential schedule to choose from. The team credits this functionality as what differentiates it from Scheedule – and also as their most difficult technical challenge to date.

This fall, the team plans to release a mobile app version that will show students their schedule on a calendar as well as provide directions to campus buildings and maps.

“That will be especially helpful for freshmen,” Scott points out.

“Well, we’re even seniors and a lot of times we don’t know where some buildings are,” Jon adds.

After a soft launch on the Illinois campus, the team had more than 1000 students visit the site. Word of mouth spread through Facebook and Reddit posts. Since then, classwhole.com has seen more than 4000 unique visitors.

“It felt really good to have it pay off. We didn’t really do any advertising, so it was nice to see people start using it,” says Kiran. “A lot of our traffic is through Facebook, so it’s like a view into the university’s social graph, watching it go viral through students liking it,” he adds.

Still, the team would like to see “pretty much everyone at the University using it.”

The team recently won a regional coding contest sponsored by Google, beating out teams from Purdue (with a Wikipedia crawler) and University of Illinois at Chicago (with an interactive lecture slide product). The team credits their products polish, successful launch, and user base with giving them the edge over their competition.
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Contact: Jennifer LaMontagne, associate director of communications, Department of Computer Science, 217/333-4049.

If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, Engineering Communications Office, 217/244-7716, editor. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.