COMPUTER SCIENCE SEARCH

Brett Hlavinka and Chris Aikens

Imagine… You’re a CSCE Junior about to start

upper-level courses You’re frustrated with howdy and

its uselessness You don’t want to pay simply to

look up professor reviews You want to find courses you have

an interest in

Sources of Information Course information is spread across

many sourceshowdy○ Course schedules

myEdu (formerly PickaProf)○ Grade distributions and reviews

CS Department website○ Course descriptions

Search Problems Searching through courses is

limitedhowdy○ Limit results with advanced search

filtersmyEdu (formerly PickaProf)○ Course number or professor’s name

CS Department website○ No searching

Motivation Problem: Cannot easily determine

which courses you want to take Solution: A consolidated,

searchable website for CS coursesView course schedulesSearch over descriptions and reviewsBe free of charge

Enter Computer Science Search (CSS)

Related Work MyEdu

Grade distributions and professor ratings/reviews

Starting at $10 a year

Related Work Stanford’s Course Rank

Search, Review, Schedule, and PlanCan be adopted by other universities

Related Work AgProfessors.com

Course/professor grade distributions and reviews

Texas A&M specific (and free of charge)

Related Work Summary

All related works incorporated good ideas○ Searching○ Reviews○ Course Descriptions

Try to integrate related works and our own ideas Idea: make a course search site specific to

Texas A&M that helps students build their scheduleShould be easy to use and allow students to

retrieve information

Methods Used Scope: make the site CSCE only with

static content to startCollected course infoMyEdu reviews as base (plus some

original) Store various fields relevant to

courses in an XML file Use Digester to parse the XML file Use Lucene to allow the user to search

over courses and reviews

Demo Search for Course Number 470 Search for Name Hurley Search for Time MWF Search for All “Database” Search for All “Aggies Roolz” Browse by Number Browse by Prof

Scenario 1 Information need: retrieve relevant

information for taking CSCE – 410 AgProfessors: Search finds course

and gives grade distributions MyEdu: Search finds course and

tells grade distributions and has professor reviews

CSS: Search finds course and gives general information about the course

Scenario 2 Information need: retrieve relevant

courses to the search “scheduling and memory allocation”Try to find course that covers this

materialHope to find CSCE – 410

AgProfessors and MyEdu fall short here

This is the reason behind CSSThe search returns CSCE – 410

Evaluation All the searchable sites have useful

information, the user needs to decide their information needGrade DistributionsProfessor ReviewsCourse Scheduling/Reviews

CSS was made to find courses from a general search

We did not expect the other sites to perform well in this area

Analysis Student values a site that is

essentially all in one package Stanford’s Course Rank has all the

features that any student would need when constructing a course scheduleSearch capabilityReviewsBuilt in schedulingPlanning

Conclusions There is an obvious absence of

searchable course listingsCSS is a site designed for finding

courses you wantCSS could be further developed to

implement more features○ Writing reviews○ Grade distributions○ Course recommendations

Conclusions Information should be consolidated

CSS is a consolidated site, combining course listings with searchable descriptions and reviews

Reduces time retrieving information, as well as the hassle of doing so

Questions?

Thank You