SYFT Schedule

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Project Team
Freya Rosenstein
Sheila Garrity
Teresa Co
Yan Huang

Project Mentor
Leah Staniorski

Instructors
Dr. Tim Wood, CS, GW Engineering
Xiaodong Qu, CS, GW Engineering

As college students, we know how hectic our lives can get at times. Classes, assignments, projects, work, and social lives pile up, and it can seem nearly impossible to balance all of them. Keeping a personal calendar is important to stay on top of deadlines, but extensive time and effort is needed to create and maintain a traditional schedule. Our team seeks to eliminate that issue with our product, SYFT Schedule.

Who experiences the problem?

Our biggest client base for SYFT Schedule is college students. As students leave their hometowns and enter college, they're most likely experiencing total independence for the first time in their lives. Balancing their classes, activities, and study sessions while still finding time to rest can be difficult, so SYFT Schedule aims to take some of that burden away, so they can focus on what matters most to them. Platforms like Google Calendar or pen-and-paper planners take time to maintain, while existing auto-schedulers are often geared towards working professionals with different scheduling needs and habits than the average college student.

Why is this problem important?

Maintaining balance is important in anyone's life, but college students have the unique experience of managing their entire lives by themselves for the first time. It's easy to fall behind in college, whether it's academically, socially, or personally. School is stressful enough as it is, and creating a schedule manually and staying on top of it only adds to it. SYFT wants to alleviate that stress as much as possible in order for college students to stay on top of their lives.

What is the coolest thing about your project?

The coolest thing is that we have integrated Google Calendar and Blackboard so students can import their assignments from Blackboard and any events in Google Calendar to minimize the amount of time they spend inputting information and academic schedules. With SYFT Schedule, users can let their lives be scheduled for them. Upon signing up, users will input their preferences regarding different facets of their lives, such as study habits, sleep schedules, and additional desired activities (like exercise or social outings). They will also have the ability to add specific events and tasks to their schedule as they see fit. Using this information, SYFT will fill in the gaps on their calendar and create events that will allow them to complete all of their tasks on time. Their schedule will be uniquely tailored to them, and they will have the ability to modify it as they see fit.

What specific technical problems did you encounter?

Working with third-party APIs has been a technical challenge since the project's beginning. Gaining the appropriate authorizations and integrating its software effectively into the rest of SYFT Schedule's algorithm has proven to be difficult. In some cases, we needed to think outside of the box in order to deliver an innovative product that users can seamlessly integrate into their daily lives.