Assignment Solutions Finder CSUA Hackathon Fall 2016

Assignment Solutions Finder

Assignment Solutions finder was the first outside of class project that I made while at Berkeley. During this small scale hackathon, my team created an app that takes a input of a PDF of section numbers a student needs to read, the problem numbers they need to respond to and a PDF of the textbook. The app then outputs a PDF file that contains the required sections to read, the required questions, and the answers.

In order to create this project, we had to first figure out how to read the input PDF. We did this by going on a very extensive search for a tool that could be used to read PDFs- eventually we decided to use PDF tools. After this step, we had to figure out how to get the proper page number This was done by creating a python file whose purpose was to find the designated page range.

A problem that we ran into while making this app was that there was a discrepancy between the actual assigned page number and the page number of the PDF (as the PDF had pages including the title). To account for this, we had to make a function that would calculate the offset. This was done by reading part of the PDF and then finding the book page number and subtracting it from the PDF page number. After these details were done, we were able to gather the section readings and the problems that were required; however, we still had to work with Slader.

To solve this problem, we had to create a slader python file that would scrape the Slader website in order to find the needed problems. Eventually, the output would give a PDF of the problems and reading and the answers as provided by Slader.