[Feature Request] Pre-Req, Co-Req Dependency Graph By Major/Minor/Program of Study

[drewtu2]

Crossposting from GraduateNu#643

Feature Request

Alumni dropping in helping current students with course planning.
CurriculumPrereq1702.pdf

The EECE department has a manually drawn diagram that shows the pre-req/co-req dependency graph of all the courses that were relevant to an undergrad course planning. This graph was invaluable to determining what order a classes should be taken in and how many semesters in advance one needed to start planning in order to take a specific high level course. I have been trying to track down and locate a similar graph for the CS department to help a current undergrad with their course planning but have not been able to find one.

Ideally these graphs should be generated automatically for every major, minor, degree etc. People should be able to query based on a course catalog year (as opposed to using just the most recent year). All of the data presumably already exists in the backend, this should hopefully be just a visualization problem.

Specifically, each course in the catalog should be treated as a node in a directed graph. Directed edges between two nodes in a graph indicates a pre-req. A co-req can be indicated by a bi-directional edge.

Additional Feature Considerations

Export to Graph Markup Languages

• The core graph structure is exportable in DOT or another graph markup language for visualization in other programs
• A few references can be found at this so post
• In the interest of implementation speed and planning for the spring semster, this is likely the easiest POC to implement. DOT files can be distributed to users who can visualize the results locally using GraphViz or other OS graph vis software.

Interactive UI

• The graph is interactive. If a user clicks on a node, the course description is provided to the user.
• Nodes can indicate what path/graduation requirements they satisfy. (I.e. satisfies CS minor, CS Core req, General elective, etc.)

Time of Year Indicators

• Certain courses are only available during certain semesters (I.e. only a fall, only a spring course, not offered in summer). While schedules change year to year, within the EECE dept, past offerings were a pretty good indicator of future offerings.