termly.ca - a UBC course scheduler

pain relievers

• the app picks an optimal section from each activity (e.g. labs, tutorials, discussions and lectures) of a course
• the app removes a course in one term when the user selects the same course in the other term

steps

1. select a term
2. select either a course or a specific section from the dropdown list
3. (optional if scheduling takes too long) use the left most button to limit the number of sections per course
   • e.g. CPSC 121, CPSC 110, ENGL 112 and CPSC 310
4. (optional) all of the following actions will trigger re-scheduling:
   • add/remove a course/section
   • change the number of sections per course
5. repeat step 1 to 4
6. follow the generated links to register courses

known issues

• adding courses in one term when the app is scheduling courses for the other term leads to a schedule inconsistent with the course list

api

the app uses https://ubc-courses-api.herokuapp.com for fetching subject/course/section data.

many thanks to @qstevens for making this api!

scheduling

preprocessing (optimization)

• convert time intervals of sections to binary representions (helps detect section conflicts in O(1) time)
• sort courses by the number of sections in an increasing order (cut the computation tree early when a conflict is detected)

looping through recursion

scheduling process might terminate early when sections are evenly distributed over 7 am to 10 pm

for (time = 7; time <= late; time += 0.5) {
  // sped up the scheduling process by reducing the number of sections per course
  const subList = list.map(c => c.filter(s => s.end <= time)); 
  schedules = getSchedules(subList);
  if (schedules.length !== 0) break;
}

schedule evaluation

1. sections end as early as possible
2. sections as close to each other as possible

upcoming

• include 2-term courses
• filter out sections with no remaining seats in real-time
• add option to include waitlist
• add more schedule evaluation methods