StudyPlanner

This program is used to help you study better. Given a class schedule and your school's academic calendar, this script creates a schedule for when to review your lecture notes. Specifically, study a lecture a day, a week, and a month (4 weeks) after you first listened to a lecture. This ensures that the material stays in your (relatively) long term memory, reducing the need to cram for exams.

Usage

Edit classes.json and calendar.json (see sections below) and then run the following:

python planner.py [savefile]

This script requires 2 files to exist in the same directory as planner.py: classes.json and calendar.json. The savefile parameter is optional (see Output section).

classes.json

classes.json represents your class schedule. It's a dictionary from a class name to the day of the week that you have that class. Here is an example:

{
  "ECE 4730": ["M", "W"],
  "ECE 3400": ["M", "W", "F"],
  "CS 4670": ["M", "W", "F"],
  "CS 4752": ["M", "W", "F"],
  "ECE 4250": ["T", "R"]
}

Days of the week are: M = Monday, T, W, R, F, S, U.

calendar.json

calendar.json represents the school's academic calendar. Namely, the start date, the end date, and vacation days. The provided calendar.json is the Cornell Spring 2015 calendar. Here it is with some comments:

{
  "start": "1/21/2015",       <- first day of class
  "end": "5/6/2015",          <- last day of class
  "vacations": [
    {
      "start": "2/14/2015",
      "end": "2/17/2015"      <- this should be the last day you're on vacation
    },
    {
      "start": "3/28/2015",
      "end": "4/5/2015"
    },
    {
      "start": "4/27/2015",   <- have the same start and end dates to indicate
      "end": "4/27/2015"         that only one day was off
    }
  ]
}

Output

The output is saved to study_schedule.txt or the savefile if provided. If the file already exists, this script fails. Here is a sample output:

02/11
  CS 4752 Lec 7, 02/04 (Week)
  ECE 3400 Lec 7, 02/04 (Week)
  ECE 4730 Lec 5, 02/04 (Week)
  CS 4670 Lec 7, 02/04 (Week)
  ECE 4250 Lec 6, 02/10 (Day)
02/12
  ECE 4250 Lec 5, 02/05 (Week)
  CS 4752 Lec 10, 02/11 (Day)
  ECE 3400 Lec 10, 02/11 (Day)
  ...

The recommended use of this output is to treat it like a TODO list. Delete each row after you finish reviewing your lecture notes from that day. Of course, feel free to do whatever you want with this.