Nimbus Syllabus is a powerful and imaginative way to elevate a college student's academic career. Every semester we undergrad students are subjected to an immense amount of paperwork. From syllabi to assignments to exams, we are tasked to organize and champion every intricate detail that is embedded in ink and paper. And, as each week passes, we have to write up papers, hand in code, and show up on time to important events. Over the past few years, systems have been introduced to simplify this overwhelming mess of responsibilities. Blackboard, Piazza, and independent tools like iStudiez and Google Drive all come to the aid of the stressed out pupil. As virtually every member of the higher education system would admit, however, every single one of these has flaws and complications that make them non-ideal. Nimbus Syllabus is a webapp meant to close the gaps between these platforms, meant for any student on the University of Rochester campus. In order to solve the numerous problems with organizing, creating, and sharing our schoolwork, we have designed the foundation for a creative and algorithmically intelligent project.
Nimbus Syllabus begins as a simple organizational tool. One of the major issues when dealing with paperwork is finding and centralizing it in the first place. Instead of dragging all of our files onto a desktop, a cloud hosting tool, or even worse, somewhere on Blackboard, Nimbus Syllabus will gladly eat up anything you upload or drag into its interface. After Nimbus Syllabus accepts whatever filetype you give it — documents, links, multimedia — it creates a color-coded block. Automatically, we have something far more powerful than the standard file browser. Nimbus Syllabus transforms a file into a visual space, color-coded based on its type (for example, pink = .PDF, blue = URL, green = .PY, customized to user preference).
After taking a raw file and converting it into a colorful rectangle, Nimbus Syllabus throws it into a timeline. This timeline is meant to visually lay out a student's entire semester, comparable to the timeline you would find in a music or video editing software. Each class (or arbitrary group the user creates) has its own track. After adding a few files, Nimbus Syllabus automatically colors and sorts them into the proper time (the time in which the file was created) — and if you dragged and dropped, the block is already in the class underneath your mouse cursor.
Already, Nimbus Syllabus is able to consolidate every single bit of important information of a student's semester. And, in a matter of seconds, a student can get a comprehensive overview of what they have accomplished, what is currently in demand, and what is to come. Downloading and working with files is a simple as double-clicking.
The final component of Nimbus Syllabus is what truly unlocks the capabilities of a good college campus: sociability. Every student who uses Nimbus Syllabus has to create an account. This account synchronizes everything he or she drops in the interface thus far. Using these same accounts, students can invite classmates or professors to view, edit, or add to their timelines. Each file, class, or timeline can be shared, similar to the permissions found on a system like Google Drive. Nimbus Syllabus is the essential tool for any college student, needing only three core aspects—(1) boundless synchronized storage, (2) automatic visual organization, (3) free instantaneous collaboration—all of which can be created using a basic CRUD system and slightly complex UI.
Nimbus Syllabus
Copyright (C) 2016 Kalila Shapiro, Julian Weiss, Charlotte Wright
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