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Free Press: Thursday, April 24, 2008
BingBuilder: Students' Creation Streamlines Scheduling with BU Brain
By: Katie Alicia Baccile
Each semester, over 15,000 students at Binghamton University try to schedule and register classes within a one-month time frame. Due to the amount of students exceeding the amount of advisors the university has to offer, students are often left on their own to create a schedule that works.
As a result of this difficulty, four B.U. students[0] have created an easier way with the launch of www.bingbuilder.com.
The site was unveiled on March 31, just days before registration opened for fall 2008.
The main designer and creator of the website, Ricky Viscomi, a sophomore computer science major, said "I bought the dot-com on the twentieth and spent the next 11 days of spring break developing the site."
The site, which allows students to either just use it and leave or register through the site for free in order to save their data, has been one of the first scheduling sites to interact with BU Brain.
On the site, all the classes from BU Brain are displayed in a drop list, where you just select the department, choose the class, and lastly, pick any discussion or activity, and then a box shows all the details of the course.
The box displays the name of the course, how many credits it is, what gen ed it counts for, the professor, where and what time it takes place, how many people are currently in it and how many seats are left.
"This information is current to the very instant[1]," said Viscomi.
Once a student has chosen a class, the website has an add button that allows them to put it on the schedule on the screen, however, if the class is full, the add feature is no longer available[2], ensuring that students don't plan on taking classes that are already full.
Extra features of the site include allowing students to click a link that displays the course description from the catalog. The site also allows for the convenience of being able to type in how many credits you currently have, and from that it displays your registration date.
In addition to this, it is also possible for students to create three different schedules in order to see what goes best with what.
"The details are laid out in a simple enough fashion where adding and dropping courses does not seem so complicated. Best of all, BingBuilder keeps everything on the same page so it runs fast and the schedule is clear to read," said Derek Torres, a junior psychobiology major.
Viscomi has been interested in creating websites for many years now. Back when he was in eighth grade, he made a free website with funny pictures and jokes to show his friends. Later on, he bought a dot-com about water guns that he ran for about a year.
Before attending B.U., Viscomi, had no programming experience, therefore, his first year here he took all the introductory computer science courses. After his second semester, he started planning for the website. He prepared by attending a computer science honors society seminar, and reading Internet forums, which became a crucial part of understanding how to create the website.
In order to know how to create the website, he bought a book and learned all about the software, Adobe Flex. This Flex would become the software for the website.
Also, he learned how to do the coding for the site, which is in a language called ActionScript 3.0. After all of this, he also had to learn how to encrypt passwords and secure the databases.
"The two biggest obstacles I faced were getting all the course information from BU Brain and then turning it into some sort of workable format, and creating the user interface; what a person would see and interact with when making a schedule," said Viscomi.
Helping to test the site and give input were three of Viscomi's friends, Dylan Curtis and Max Pollak, who currently attend other schools, and Eddie Barrett, a sophomore accounting major at B.U.
Pollak, an advertising major, helps Viscomi to design some of the promos to use on the site or, potentially, for advertisements.
Curtis, a marketing major, said, "I come up with new marketing plans for the website and advise Viscomi on what course of action to take, as far as promoting the site is concerned. I knew this site was just an idea of Ricky's and it's really amazing to see it come to be realized."
Barrett, who is currently in charge of testing new ideas and keeping track of the expenses, said, "My end is much simpler than his [Viscomi's], and what he does with computers is like a foreign language to me." So far, the website is doing extremely well, being visited 8,495 times and currently having 302 registered accounts[3]. One way of promoting bingbuilder.com has come through another website, Facebook.
Viscomi created a Facebook event for the site and has also recently purchased advertising space on Facebook for the site. "The add on Facebook has been displayed 12,629 times, resulting in 12 clicks[4] (people who follow the ad to my site), and it has only been up for a little over four hours. Facebook accounts for roughly 25% of my visitors," said Viscomi.
One B.U. student, a junior nursing major, Abeer Minhas, said "I learned of BingBuilder through Facebook, and since then, it has been a crucial instrument in helping me to create an awesome schedule for next semester without having to go through the usual hassle."
"My main motivation for building the site was the pressing need for a scheduling site that can actually work with BU Brain," said Viscomi.
So far, he has spent over 250 hours working on the site and $100 of his own money.
"I maintain this site out of my own enjoyment and I don't make any money from advertising nor do I get any college credit. My compensation is knowing that I created a service that people not only find helpful, but enjoyable to use."
Michael Galarraga, a freshman psychobiology major, said, "BingBuilder has a great look and is very convenient and easy to use. It is highly sophisticated in its template and I see myself using it for next semester."
Viscomi said that the website is "very much a work in progress" and that he "welcomes feedback and takes it very seriously." Some of the current issues being worked on by Viscomi are the printing and advanced options that currently do not work. Also, there are many other things that have not been implemented into the site, such as his first motivation of having a drag and drop support, and also being able to view your schedule in either a horizontal or vertical layout, with only horizontal currently available.
"These smaller features are constantly being worked on behind the scenes and should get done over the summer," said Viscomi. The current consensus among the creators is that they love user feedback, and they want to know what the student body thinks and how the site is helping them.
Errata
0 As noted later in the article, the four people directly involved in the development of BingBuilder are actually from different schools. Ricky and Eddie both attend Binghamton University, while Max and Dylan do not. We communicate by phone, email, and even Facebook to collaborate if we cannot meet in person.
1 The information that is current "to the very instant" is the enrollment amount, as it is pulled directly from BU Brain whenever a section is selected. The more general information such as listings of departments and the courses they offer are updated less frequently because they are much less liable to change. To get the latest timestamp of our course information, see the "brain" of BingBuilder in the assets/ directory.
2 In the case that a course fills up, the "Add" feature is actually still available. What happens when a course is full is simply that there is a warning message that will appear in red indicating that the course's actual enrollment figures are greater than or equal to the capacity for a given section. In addition to the red warning, hovering over the "Add" button will also display a warning of the issue. The important thing to note is that the "Add" button will still put that course on your schedule when selected. This is not counter-intuitive because we want to allow users to make multiple possibilities of schedules, even if that schedule contains full courses. For example, if a course is full, one may just make another schedule possibility and include that course as a way of saying "When a spot opens up, I want to take this course and modify my overall schedule in this way."
3 As of this time of writing, we have 11,728 visits and 480 registered users.
4 Also as of this time of writing, the Facebook advertisement has been displayed 109,332 times, resulting in 89 clicks.
Staff Editorial
This may not be a shocking editorial, but it's a necessary subject. We all know that the community spirit at our beloved campus is lacking. Few campus events unite students across the board, and cultural, religious, and interest-based cliques dominate the social scene. More personally, it's rare when a single student really goes out of his or her way to help another student. Some of this past week's events show the relatively contentious attitude between students.
The grievance brought to the Student Association Rules Committee regarding the Experimental Media Organization was frivolous at best. The authors of the grievance brought political considerations into a non-political body. The entire process seemed to be based on objections to either the political views of EMO or political objection to their use of civil disobedience. We don't necessarily agree with the methods that EMO used to protest the war, but we certainly agree with the premise -- even if we didn't, we would absolutely support a group's right to express their objection to war.
Furthermore, the entire grievance was based on unsubstantiated claims of harassment. Students shouldn't be the ones attacking students for judicially based offenses. Any sort of judicial action should be filed by the (allegedly) threatened student to university police and handled accordingly. The grievers even wanted the committee to use evidence from Facebook. Don't we get offended when the university or employers use Facebook as evidence against us?
It's impossible to really know what happened between the threatened student and the members of EMO. No student should threaten another student: that's for sure. In the end, extraneous students filing grievances against a student group just continues the cycle of employing threat to a place that we shouldn't go. Students should be helping other students, not hurting each other.
For this reason, we're proud to feature BingBuilder in our paper this week. Ricky Viscomi's project shows foresight, creativity, and generosity to other students. He pursued the process to hone his computing skills and to give back to his fellow bearcats. That type of service is rare on this campus. Many of the other student-run projects like BUSI Plus or bingmenus came out of the SOM entrepreneurial class; Viscomi didn't create BingBuilder for a grade.
Viscomi's example should be followed by others. More students should work on projects that give back to the community and help fellow students. B.U. students must come together as a community. Too often are we divided in the face of an increasingly distant administration. If students can give back to students and help one another, we can come together and improve our campus. If we students won't improve our own campus, who will? Can we expect anyone else to do the job for us? It's on us.
