Fourplan - Computer Prototypes

Thank you for testing our prototype for Fourplan!

System Requirements

The prototype is web-based, and is cross-platform compatible. You will need the Silverlight plugin for your browser, which you may already have installed. If you visit the site and you are not prompted for an installation, then you do not need to do any setup.  

We are of one unsupported configuration: Firefox 4. Other browsers with the plugin have worked fine for us. We have tested on at least the following platforms: Windows XP (IE 6), Windows 7 (Chrome), Mac OS (Firefox 3.5.18, Chrome). Please let us know if we are incorrect!

We have attempted to make this website functional for as many different screen resolutions as possible. You will find your experience is substantially better at resolutions greater than 1024x768, because you can view 2 years of courses at once.

Access Instructions

The prototype can be accessed here:

http://web.mit.edu/pquimby/Public/6.831/Publish/FourplanTestPage.html

Description and Limitations

Description:

• Our interface launches with a pre-generated Course 6 course map for incoming freshman.
• The interface supports drag and drop features for course objects allowing you to manually position where a course is located.
• Users can add classes using the 'Add Class (+)' button and then link it to a specific class in the information pane.
• Classes are color coordinated by which requirements they target (ie. GIR, Major, HASS).
• The course selection boxes support an Intelli-Search feature, allowing users to either type in a required course or browse through the directory.
• Courses can be deleted from the map, by ex-ing out of them.
• Editing course data on the left (ie. course taken, completion status), should provide live updates to the corresponding course object appearing in the map.

Limitations:

• This interface uses the course data from the current semester (Spring 2011). This limitation will be removed in the future version, when we will use a complete year of courses. There are minor flaws in the course data text, which is drawn from the real MIT online course catalog.
• We are currently bypassing a login screen and assuming that you are a course 6 major. This assumption is only used for coloring which courses are "in major" and which courses are not. We will allow you to select a major in the future at log in.
• There is no persistent storage of your work across sessions. We will probably not implement this for the final version. However, the final version will prompt you for the necessary information to do this saving with user login data. 
• Because we are not tracking your major, we are also not tracking which course requirements are unfulfilled by your current schedule. In the future, any courses that are required for your major will turn into placeholders if you delete them. For instance, if you delete one of 2 AUS classes in your schedule, a course will appear labelled "Course 6 - AUS Req." This however, is part of the back-end implementation.
• Currently you are limited to 8 semesters and one pre-frosh semester for ASE/AP credit. In the future, you will be able to add as many semesters as you like.
• Currently, we are only showing course number, description, and semesters offered in the details of a course. All the other course data from the catalog is available to us and will be displayed in the detailed coures description.
• You can violate the semesters that a course is offered by dragging them into semesters where they cannot go. This will not be the case in the final version, where you will not be able to drop on semesters in which the class is not taught, and you will see a clear visual indicator that the semester is unavailable when you have it selected..
• There are no ways to export your schedule offline at the moment.

Outstanding Questions for Users

• Do you like having to select a department before entering a course number? The developers disagreed over this, so we're looking for feedback as to whether just one combo menu for department/number that did searching as you typed would be better.
• Considering the Course Title and Description are both read-only Would you prefer to see them as a label or as a the standard grayed-out/read-only text box?