New class registration tool comes to Penn

Two students are out to create a Penn InTouch 2.0.

Coursicle is a registration tool that started at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Created by Tara Aida, a senior at Harvard University, and Joe Puccio, a senior at UNC Chapel Hill, Coursicle has now expanded onto the Penn campus, where around 630 students use the site.

Coursicle is a registration tool that allows students to choose from an array of what they call “cards,” and each card represents a section of a class. If you click on a card, it shows a description of the class, whether or not it cross lists with any other courses, among other information.

One advantage of Coursicle is that the cards enable students to search for classes quickly, as opposed to using a table view. Students are also able to view textbook prices from the Penn Bookstore, Amazon and Chegg.

However, one improvement that Aida and Puccio hope to make within the tool is to integrate it with Penn Course Review data.

“Basically because we aren’t Penn students, we can’t get our hands on the data, but potentially if we end up working with some students at Penn, that will change,” Puccio said.

Puccio and Aida have been reaching out to Penn students for feedback by posting on various Facebook pages. They are also in direct contact with Penn Computer and Information Science students.

“We mainly chose Penn because Joe and I had quite a few number of friends that go to Penn, and they had expressed things that could be improved about Penn InTouch. One of my good friends said that it was annoying that you couldn’t search for classes that count for two [general education requirements] — you had to manually do it," Aida said. "We also know that Penn has a lot of student-developed tools, and so we figured that Penn is already a school where people are used to course registration software created by students.” 

The two plan on expanding their reach to various other colleges. Coursicle launched at University of Notre Dame a month ago and is planning to launch at Brown and Appalachian State Universities in the near future. 

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