Overview
A huge part of SUTD’s multidisciplinary curriculum is the Capstone Project, a final year project which brings together students from different pillars to work in teams, where they can contribute their accumulated expertise and skills to solve real-world challenges. Students will spend their last two terms in SUTD planning, crafting, and refining their solutions to the problem posed to them for the project.
The SUTD Capstone Office manages the running of the Capstone project programme, taking care of the logistics of the operation, including the planning of the Capstone Exhibition, which is where students get to showcase what they have accomplished throughout the project.
This Exhibition is normally held at the Campus Centre, a two-storey building located at the entrance of the school.
Problem
Capstone Office staff have to allocate the spaces for many different capstone projects according to various factors, such as the dimensions provided by each team, as well as the type of project undertaken by each team. Taking all of these into account, the office has to ensure that the area of the campus centre (top and bottom floors) is efficiently filled, and this endeavour requires substantial effort as it is all done manually.
With the number of projects and their variety increasing throughout the years, the effort required is steadily increasing, placing a greater workload on the Capstone Office staff.
Proposed Solution
Our proposed solution is for the Capstone Office staff to use our web application, which utilizes a packing algorithm that automatically generates a mapping between Capstone groups and their allocated space, hence effectively automating the process of allocation, significantly lessening the effort required by the Capstone Office staff.
Our web application consists of two core components: the front-end Graphical User Interface (GUI) and the back-end algorithm. The web GUI provides all user-end functionality, such as the creation and editing of ‘bins’, which are the boxes set by the user to demarcate the space used for allocation of the Capstone projects. The back-end algorithm, which is based on a third-party library, manages the actual packing of the projects into the demarcated spaces using various built-in functions.
How to run the code
- Clone the master branch
- Open the Base GUI folder
- Run the Capstone Allocation HTML File