NUS (Unofficial) Timetable Builder: From Students, for Students

A group of undergraduates from NUS School of Computing (SoC) have created a software application known as the Unofficial NUS timetable builder, offering their peers a new and improved way for students to plan their class modules. In February 2009, the application was created as a group project in class C3216: Software Development on Evolving Platforms. Since then, there has been more than 2000 downloads of the timetable builder.

Featuring a colourful and vibrant interface with easy to use functions, the timetable builder serves as a handy reference for students once they have finalised their timetable. Without using an internet connection, students can access the application on their desktop to view their class schedules.

The idea of creating a timetable builder came about in 2009, when Koh Zi Han who was then in his second year of undergraduate studies, found it frustrating to use the existing official timetable builder which appeared rather rigid. His ideal timetable application would have a friendlier timetable-building interface, which would also allow one to export one’s timetable into external formats such as Excel spreadsheet, Outlook, Google Calendar, as well as facilitate the sharing of timetables between students so that they may find common available timeslots, and so forth.

An opportunity to build upon this idea came about in Zi Han’s second semester class CS3216, where students had to build an ‘occasionally connected application’ using a system called Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) as one of their assignments. An occasionally connected application uses information from a remote database that does not have to be continuously retrieved from the database.

Zi Han then approached three of his classmates -- Tan Kian Boon, a Year 2 student from Faculty of Arts and Social Science; Liu Linxi, a Year 1 Communications and New Media student; and Wang Sha, a Year 1 student majoring in Computer Science to create the application’s design, animation and programming codes. As the group was short on developers, Zi Han roped in his brother, Zi Chun, who is also a student at SoC, to help as well. With a time frame of just three weeks to complete the assignment, the team managed to create a user-friendly, efficient and easy-to-use timetable builder system, which to date, has had 465 people liking it on Facebook. Students have commented that it is a great tool to use in planning their modules. The timetable builder is updated regularly by students of the current batch of class C3216. The link to download the NUS Unofficial Timetable can be found here.

Screenshots by courtesy of the Timetable Builder team

Text and photos by Alicia Bok, Executive, SoC External Relations

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