Computer science majors build a tool to help prospective students interested in 鎊飪腦瞳
More students than ever are graduating high school with college credits already under their belts something that has posed a challenge to college registrars tasked with evaluating how those dual-credit courses apply to their institutions. At Centre, computer science students have been playing a role in implementing a handy solution.
Working under the guidance of Professor of Computer Science and Data Science Michael Bradshaw, students were instrumental in developing an online tool to help applicants understand how their credits would transfer to 鎊飪腦瞳and how many credit hours they would receive upon enrollment.
Their work has helped provide clarity to students hoping to join the 鎊飪腦瞳community.
Evaluating these courses for equivalency began taking up a significant amount of time in our office, said 鎊飪腦瞳 Registrar Jacob Johnson, who noted that 1/3 of first-year students submitted courses for transfer credit.
As students from high schools around the country submitted their credits, the registrars office began building a database of the courses they had evaluated.
I noticed that many other institutions have a dual credit/transfer equivalency finder webpage that assisted current and prospective students. I mentioned this in a conversation with Professor Bradshaw and he suggested this could be a good project opportunity for his students, Johnson said.
Bradshaw seized on his conversation with Johnson to devise a project for students that would give them a taste of professional web programming working with a client to develop a tool that could be fully implemented into the office workflow.
He put out a call to computer science majors who might be interested in a reading group. They would convene regularly to discuss their readings and work on a design.
By the end of that semester, they'd created a prototype and they'd learned not only web development, but in particular React (JavaScript) programming, Bradhsaw said. It allows you to have the tool be interactive and do some more interesting things than just a table.
The following semester, research students followed up on the proof of concept and took the app across the finish line to full implementation, working with 鎊飪腦瞳web developers to allow seamless integration into the Colleges website while providing maximum functionality for users.
They stripped it all back down and rebuilt it all, Bradshaw said. The students really learned what it takes to get something like that up and running. They would make changes and meet with the web developer and get feedback. It was a lot of communication and a lot of making sure that everyone was pleased with the product.
It was in those final weeks before the tool was ready to launch that the students learned key real-world lessons that arent always part of the classroom experience.
When we started developing the tool we focused on working with the registrar. He gave us the project idea, we designed it with him in mind, and he approved our design, said Jackson Arnold, class of 2025. But unlike a school assignment, where you only have a single professor whose criteria you must meet, we eventually found out we also had to work with and get the approval of the communications team.
Since the students wanted the tool to live at Centre.edu, some extra steps were needed to seamlessly blend into the web platform.
We had to rework multiple elements of the tools visual design to match it with the sites overall interface. We also had to work with the web developer to figure out how to effectively implement the tool into the site, Arnold said. Learning to discover all your necessary stakeholders before you start a project is a key skill that unfortunately cant be practiced in a typical classroom environment. Thats what made this experience so valuable, though.
For Bradshaw, seeing students work through the challenges of partnering with multiple external partners and make changes needed to gain approval from the final customer was a key part of the project.
The thing they hadnt quite understood about working on something real is that the coding is the smallest piece, Bradshaw said. Its the part before, where youre trying to understand what the problem is and who youre working with and what youre trying to help with.
The end result can be found at www.centre.edu/about/offices/registrar/ap-and-dual-credit-equivalency. The tool allows prospective students to easily search from a wide range of classes that have already been evaluated and quickly see how the credits apply to Centre. The web page also guides students through the process of requesting a dual-credit course be evaluated for a 鎊飪腦瞳equivalency.
Naturally, since we have not been accepting these credits for long, the webpage will become increasingly more useful as we build our database of evaluated dual credit courses each year, Johnson said. However, the webpage has already provided the Admission Office with a place to direct prospective students that inquire about their dual credit courses. Our office has been able to standardize responses more effectively to students asking about dual credit since we now have a centralized webpage where that information resides.
