by Niki Acton '16

Students searching for spring term courses now have a new tool at their disposal. As part of CS 320: Database Systems, taught by Associate Professor of Computer Science Jaime Spacco, students created a searchable database of the Spring Term schedule. The registrar selected the winning schedule, created by a team of student programmers, and has made it available to students throughout pre-registration.

"I am always looking for assignments that apply computer science to a real world problem," said Spacco, who has been teaching at Knox since 2010. "The course schedule project is a real project that students know will be used pretty heavily during pre-registration, and it seems like they put a lot more work into it than a typical assignment that I make up and that only I would ever see."

This year, about a dozen teams of students built their own version of the searchable course schedule. Each team's project had the same set of required features, but students tried to differentiate their work in different ways.

The winning team (Amalia Hertel '16, Kylie Behnke '16, and Alan Lee '15) integrated the major and minor requirements into the main page and spent significant time working on the look of the page.

"We paid special attention to usability and similar aspects, which was definitely an important feature," said Hertel. "Our team also worked hard to make sure that all of the course information was accurate."

Spacco, who has 20 student advisees and back-to-back meetings during pre-registration, is excited about the database.

"All of this information is available in various places, such as the Registrar's PDF file, department web pages, and my.knox.edu [the campus community portal]," said Spacco. "However, there is no single source that quickly gives people access to all of the information at the same time. Speed and efficiency are crucial for faculty during pre-registration."

The database is available for students and faculty to use during pre-registration for Spring 2015. The information is based on the PDF schedule available, so some offerings and times may have changed.