It was a familiar scene: every semester, Communication Department faculty would sit down with our advisees and tally how many Communication courses each student had taken that count toward the student’s desired concentration. For both students and faculty, this process proved tedious and confusing. I began to wonder whether there was a way to give students more agency over their path to the Communication major, rather than relying on faculty to do the tallies.
I created this interactive desktop application using the visual programming software Max/MSP. Each course is color coded with the concentration(s) it counts for, and checkboxes populate each course for students to tally their credit totals themselves. Additionally, I built an option to save the completed game board as a jpeg for students to send to their advisor prior to meeting with them. Overall, this app saved students and faculty alike both time and frustration, as it took the guesswork out of the advising process.