Final Writeup

Design

Implementation

Our system, built with a Django backend, allows users to store and save the trips that they plan as well as the personal information used to match the user to particular colleges. The system is scalable in the sense that it would be easy to add additional attributes (top majors, etc.) as new search criteria in the future, but some aspects of our implementation have led to latency issues in loading different pages.

Each school has attribute values associated with it for each of the different search criteria (GPA, SAT, and ACT); users who are logged in will also have attribute values for each of those criteria. The search functionality(the "Find Schools" button) runs a matching algorithm between student attribute values and college attribute values.

We combined the "Select Schools", "Plan Itinerary", and "Review Itinerary" options into one page using JQuery UI Tabs.

We used Google Maps clustering in order to 

Each event is tied to a particular college and a particular timeblock. When the trip dates are changed, CollegeRoute will

The latency associated with loading the search result page was one of the primary usability issues with our interface. Our interface gives the user some feedback about the latency associated with that page through the use of a "loading spinner" and text which indicates that our application is "Finding schools for you...". However, we do not direct the user to a cached version of the search result page if they want to revisit their school selections; the page only displays once it has been reloaded. We did not analyze the implementation bottlenecks that were causing these delays, but in future work, we would want to understand better and address the source of these delays. We would also want to implement a stronger result caching scheme, either in our data representations or in the manner in which the tabs are loaded.

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