In response to the frustration often generated by the Brown Online Course Announcement, five computer science concentrators have created a user-friendly and more comprehensive version of BOCA.
The new program, called Mocha, is not affiliated with the University or the Registrar's Office, but it is currently available to students on a Web site hosted by the Department of Computer Science's server. Some of Mocha's features include the ability to add courses to a shopping cart and to create a color-coordinated schedule. Students can also bookmark classes and enter class numbers without the number of zeroes required by BOCA. An additional benefit of the site is enhanced search capability, according to the creators.
BOCA only allows one description to be searched at a time, while Mocha allows for "any kind of search you can think of," according to Dave Pacheco '07, one of the site's creators. BOCA is usually slow the night before classes start, he added, but with Mocha, the condensed searches reduce the load on the servers.
Mocha is the creation of five members of the class of 2007 - Pacheco, Daniel Leventhal, Adam Cath, Dave Hirshberg and Bill Pijewski - who came up with the idea for an alternative to BOCA last spring during CS 32: "Introduction to Software Engineering." The scope of a final project for the class inspired them to redesign BOCA's interface. "Sometimes I was getting so frustrated with BOCA, so I wanted to make something a little more flexible," Pacheco said.
While the students were busy last semester, they devoted their winter break to creating Mocha, downloading data from BOCA and communicating online. "It was a fun project because we all came into it with a feature we were interested in," Leventhal said. Pacheco said that he logged over 100 hours working on Mocha.
The creators claim their rationale for producing Mocha was selfish. "We mainly did it so we could not have to use BOCA," Pacheco said. However, they did consider the Brown community when designing it. "We made it useful to us and added things that could be useful to other people," Leventhal said.
While the CS department has been very "gracious" toward the project, Pacheco said that the Registrar's Office has been less than helpful. The site's creator's asked the Registrar's Office for access to the data that runs BOCA, but they were denied because the office did not think the project was possible, according to Pacheco. The Registrar's Office also said that it would be a waste of time since BOCA already exists and will be supplanted by Banner, the new online course registration system, he said.
"The biggest problem is data isn't given to us by the Registrar," Pacheco said.
University Registrar Michael Pesta and Associate Registrar Brook Moles could not be reached for comment.
Some students who have tried Mocha have reacted positively to the new interface. "I have enough other things to think about. It makes shopping period so much easier," said Annie Blazejack '09.
"It was fun to find a new program that cut the work in half for me," said Daniela Alvarado '08.
Jonathan Juarez '09 added that Mocha was "a dream come true for the disorganized."
The Web site was put together over four days, and as of Tuesday night was running off of Pacheco's computer. It is now being hosted by the CS department, which has a much more powerful server.
In the future, "there will not be a lot of maintenance we will have to do," Pacheco said. He hoped they would be able to pass the maintenance of Mocha onto others once he and his fellow programmers graduate. "We are not planning to dedicate a huge part of the semester to it," Leventhal said.
Still, they plan to add features such as e-mail reminders about exams, exam times, compatibility with iCal - a calendar program created by Apple Computer, Inc. - and the ability to link schedules between users.
The URL for Mocha is http://mocha.cs.brown.edu.
