A Web App that helps McGill students plan their degree
a HUGE THANK to @EvEnzyme for ideation, UX, writups and mental supports :)
As a McGill student, I often find it frustrating to plan my degree:
- I had to jump between different webpages (course descriptions, program requirements) and keep my own notes in Google Docs or text files, which I would eventually lose the following year.
- It was hard to figure out which electives I could take based on the courses I had already completed.
- Finding courses and programs that actually matched my interests was even harder.
- Existing tools like myProgress and VSB serve different purposes, but neither made long-term planning easy.
AcaMapa addresses these issues by crawling and parsing program/course information and offering a visual, drag-and-drop planning experience that’s both simple and flexible.
- Find & pin your program(s)
- Add required and complementary courses directly from the parsed results.
- Plan your degree semester by semester
- Reorder and organize terms and courses with simple drag-and-drop.
- Add extra or missing courses into terms through search.
- Explore future electives directly from course cards and dive deeper into areas of interest.
- Validate your plan with requirement checks
- Courses are shown in green if all requirements are satisfied and red if not.
- Requirements are validated against pre-, co-, and anti-requisites.
- Supported requirement types include:
- AND:
COMP 206 AND COMP 302 - OR:
COMP 202 OR COMP 250 - Select two from a list:
Two from COMP 206, COMP 302, COMP 250, COMP 330 - Credit-based:
12 credits from COMP at 300-level or higher
- AND:
- You can overwrite a course’s requirements to mark it as satisfied.
- Equivalent checks (e.g.
COMP 252vsCOMP 251) are supported by custom rules, they count towards pre-requisites, co-requisites, and restrictions. - Add completed courses to Courses Taken to provide context for prerequisite checks across all plans.
- Create multiple plans aiming at different programs or degrees.
- Inspect plan statistics, including total credits and average credits per term, to better evaluate your workload.
- Validate in VSB
- Terms indicated with red triangle (current term) or red circle (term in current academic year) can be checked in VSB
- Share with others
- Export plans as PNG images, including stats and courses taken, to share with academic advisors or fellow students.
- Import exported plans from the embedded QR codes, plan based on previous experiances!
- Save your plans
- Plans are stored locally and persist across page refreshes.
- Plans can be stored as the exported image.
- Localization
- English is fully supported.
- French support is included but still needs refinement — contributions are welcome! Open an issue if you’d like to help.
AI (Deprecated)Semantic search (RAG) for programs and courses based on your interests.Automated plan generation tailored to your workload preferences.Enhanced subsequent course search: recommendations based on your entire plan, not just a single course.
📣 Note: AcaMapa might be useful for students at other schools too! If you’d like to adapt this tool to your university, it mainly requires preparing a MongoDB database with your school’s program and course information. Open an issue to get in touch!
- Frontend & Backend: Next.js, MongoDB, Redux Toolkit, Hello-pangea/dnd
- Auth & Email: Auth.js, Resend
- AI (incoming): MongoDB Atlas, LangGraph
Add the following to your .env:
ANALYZE="false"
APP_HOST="0.0.0.0"
APP_PORT="3030"
DOMAIN="your.domain"
MONGODB_DATABASE_NAME="a MongoDB Database that implements the interface"
MONGODB_URI="URI to your MongoDB Database"
USE_DIFF_SYNC="0"
# I used upstash redis, optional for yours
UPSTASH_KV_REST_API_READ_ONLY_TOKEN=
UPSTASH_KV_REST_API_TOKEN=
UPSTASH_KV_REST_API_URL=
UPSTASH_KV_URL=
UPSTASH_REDIS_URL=
USER_DATABASE_NAME="auth"
MongoDB files: open an issue to contact me, and I’ll share the parsed results.
# Clone the repo
git clone https://github.com/MichaelangJason/AcaMapa.git
# Install dependencies
pnpm install # or npm install
# Setup Husky & lint-staged
pnpm prepare # or npm prepare
# Run in dev mode
pnpm dev
# Build & start
pnpm build
pnpm start- Local degree planning with drag & drop
- Current Academic Year + Check viability in VSB
- Import from JSON/image (exported by this app)
- Equivalent course check
- UI refinement
- Automatic updater(crawler) of Courses and Programs
-
Remote plan saving with McGill login (deprecated) -
AI-powered program & course search (deprecated) -
Automated plan generation (workload-based) (deprecated)