Every once in a while I find a tool that does its job way better than anything else around. This is the case with the Guerrilla Time Schedule, a student-built tool that helps people navigate the otherwise complicated class schedules for UW Bothell, UW Seattle, or UW Tacoma.
Guerrilla Time Schedule
For whatever historical reasons, the official UW online time schedules are complicated to use. And there is a separate website for each of UW Bothell, UW Seattle, and UW Tacoma.
For instance, try using the official UW sites to find out what computer science courses are taught on Wednesday afternoons. Or what classes are taught by your favorite teacher. Or when a particular course is offered, even when you know which department or program is offering it. All of these things are difficult to do in the existing UW sites.
Thus, a set of undergraduate Computing & Software Systems students built the Guerrilla Time Schedule for their Cooperative Education (aka capstone) project, with guidance from Mike Stiber. The Guerrilla Time Schedule is simply a front end, getting all of its data from the official UW websites. However, it provides a simple way to specify a filter allowing you to quickly answer the types of queries mentioned in the previous paragraph. As a professor, I find myself using it more and more to quickly see who is teaching what, when.
Given that this tool works so much better than the official UW time schedules, I had hoped that the official UW time schedule sites would mention the Guerrilla Time Schedule, even if they refer to it as an “experimental” system. However, no such luck. The UW does not sanction it. This means that most students never hear about it, and thus do not gain the benefits of using such a simple tool.
What would it take for UW to point to this experimental tool which does such a better job than the existing UW time schedule?
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