ABSTRACT
The issue we are trying to solve is the fact that many prospective students are unsure of what course to select within the Institute of Healthcare Engineering, due to course names sounding superficially similar, as well as having a lot of content overlap between them. This causes problems for the IHE staff, as the confusion would lead to a higher rate of students wanting to change courses, which increases the administrative burden on the department.
Our solution is to create a course decision tool in the form of a website in order to help students choose the best course for them. The beneficial impact of this is that the website would help improve student satisfaction and help the IHE, as the tool could help reduce the amount of course switching once students have already enrolled. To achieve this, we have gathered information using interviews and web scrapers, built our own database and API, and a React front end to display the tool.
Our final prototype is a live website hosted on Azure’s Kubernetes Service (AKS).
We are extremely proud of what we have accomplished in our project. Not only have we done every single ‘must’ and ‘should’ requirement, but we also made sure to build our project in a way that is sustainable, maintainable and easily extensible, and have deployed it in an efficient kubernetes cluster on Azure. We have also completed all the ‘could’ have requirements, except for one.
We are also proud of the fact that we presented our tool in an Institute of Healthcare Engineering delivery group meeting on the behalf of our client, providing us with the chance to showcase our software to others.
Finally, we are also happy with the way we have grown and benefitted from the project. We have learnt many new software skills such as using new frameworks like MySQL, Fast API react and jest as well as using cloud resources such as Azure Kubernetes Service. This project has also helped hone our soft skills such as user analysis and requirement gathering, and has helped us improve our team work and time management.
| Key features of our project |
|---|
| Straightforward, user-friendly interface with React JS |
| Quick data queries using SQLAlchemy |
| Fast data collection with a Python web scraper and FastAPI |
| Filtering and ranking algorithms in Python |
| Developer oversight on Azure |
| Scalable deployment using Kubernetes and Docker |
