Overview
Daniel's goal was to make it easier for students to obtain a degree through distance education and writing exams for credit.
Before Diplomap, self-study students would need to construct their curriculum themselves, piecing together courses from several sources. Students would also need to calculate which of their existing credits could count towards their degree, and which would be unusable.
Daniel came to us to build his Minimal Viable Product (MVP) and streamline this process for students.
Concept
Diplomap's purpose was to make it easy for students to plan a 4-year bachelor's degree curriculum without any effort.
To achieve this goal, we'd need to accomplish a few things first:
- Collect courses from several sources
Passing a few dozen classes means you can get your degree, so we'd need a course directory that students could choose from to build a personalized degree. - Curriculum planner
Students must be able to choose their desired degree, provide their existing credits, and have the system spit out a customized curriculum for them that satisfies all of their course requirements. - Payments with a simple User Interface
Students are already strapped for time, so the system needed to be quick, easy to pay for, and easy to use.
Solutions
- Responsive Single Page Application
We created a simple mobile-friendly web application that displays courses, builds curricula, and allows students to pay quickly using Credit Card. - Course Database
We used web scraping and simple machine learning algorithms to extract course data from public sources and compile them automatically. - Automated Curriculum Planner
We modeled the curriculum planning problem as a series of logical equations that must be satisfied. We then used the Z3 Theorem Prover to automatically construct a curriculum that would satisfy a particular degree's credit hour requirements and limitations.