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Tutorial
Welcome to BingBuilder's photo tutorial. Here, you will find images guiding you through various features and will hopefully show you something you did not know you could do. This tutorial is not intending to teach people how to use BingBuilder, because it's really not at all hard to understand. Instead, all of the little helpful features that are hidden and may be overlooked are pointed out and explained so that you can use them to your advantage the next time you're using the program. This section will grow as more features are added and will eventually be a complete guide to creating a schedule. As it is in development, though, the features will be limited to just the basics to get people started. If you'd like to see a feature described here, send us feedback.
The Schedule Info box shows current information about your schedule. When you first get to the schedule builder, there are no classes on the canvas so everything is set to zero. As you add courses, these numbers are automatically updated. Courses: indicates how many different courses are currently on your schedule. If a course has a Lecture and a Discussion, for example, both of them combined act as one course. Hours: represents the total number of hours of class in one week and Credits: shows the total amount of credits between all courses in the schedule. Comparing credits and hours is useful sometimes when you want to see how much you need to give in a week per how many credits you get back. To use an obvious example, if your schedule is 14 hours in a week but you're only earning 8 credits, start considering other courses (not Physics, Bio, or Chem...) with less demanding schedules.
In the top right corner, sign in is a button that will allow you to login to or register your BingBuilder account. See the "Signing In" section for more about this. Print is a feature that is currently not implemented but will open a new window with a printable schedule view. Reset will clear your schedule canvas of all courses and consequently reset all of your schedule info. This action cannot be undone, so use it only when you need to. Load will connect to your BingBuilder account and pull up one of three saved schedules. A blank schedule will load if nothing is saved. This action will overwrite any courses that are currently on the schedule regardless of whether there is a conflict or not with the new schedule. Be sure to save your courses if you want to retain them. Save will also connect to your account and will store information about your courses on a server so that you can exit the program and load the data at your convenience.
List CRNs opens a window within the schedule application with a list of all course reference numbers (CRNs). A CRN is simply a number used to identify a specific section of a course. This list is useful if you would like to go to BU BRAIN and register the courses you picked out on BingBuilder. BU BRAIN gives you the option to add courses by their CRN, so as long as you have the numbers, you don't have to worry about looking for the courses again on BRAIN.
Advanced is a feature that is still being designed. It will allow users to search for courses by a number of different parameters such as time of day, professor, credit amount, GenEd, etc. The Dept and GenEd radio buttons are the view options for how to browse for courses. Currently, only Departments can be browsed but GenEd browsing capabilities will be functional shortly. Finally, at the bottom of the Schedule Info box is a timestamp of how accurate the course data is. BU BRAIN's course information is scanned periodically and interpreted by BingBuilder's programs to be able to be read into the schedule builder as an actual course or an actual department. This information gets updated frequently.
The Department List is a collection of all departments with at least one course offered. The departments are abbreviated by their official university abbreviation the same way BUSI did and BU BRAIN does. They are sorted alphabetically to make finding a specific department easy. When using lists on BingBuilder you can always select an item traditionally by clicking on it with your mouse, or you can move up and down the list with the arrow keys on your keyboard. This allows you to jog through the list quickly, while the information about each selected department shows up in the rightmost info box (Semester Info by default).
When the program first loads, or when you press the Reset button, the Semester Info box will display general information about the current semester. This information includes what season and year it is, the number of GenEds available, and how many total departments, courses, and sections are offered. Some possible information that may be added here could be semester start and end dates and the finals week date. If you have any suggestions for useful things to put here, do let us know.
Check back frequently for a complete tutorial on all of BingBuilder's features.
