CAO Results Tool

Onc day we discussing the various services RTÉ Aertel provided, especially during the 90s and 00s and we recalled using Aertel to check our CAO results (a service aertel no longer has).

Other members of the team recalled using Newspapers and other forms of media however none used the web?

We then realised that although the CAO website provided a PDF of the results, similarly to Aertel and Newspapers you had to trawl through every course to find what you were looking for.

The Solution?

We decided to build a small web application that allowed students to quickly find their courses by entering the course name, code or even college name. In addition we would display a graph illustrating how points have increased/decreased over the years.

How?

We contacted the CAO who were very enthusiastic about the idea and were open to sharing their data with us.

The CAO provided us with several years worth of data including the current year (which we were instructed not to publish until the results were officially released) in CSV format.

We began building a web app using AngularJS. Although we had used JQuery CSV before we had an issue with the data as the format varied over the years.

We decided to write a simple Python script to clean the data and convert it into our own JSON format. This data could then easily be parsed by the web app. This also allowed us compile the various years so we could graph the increase/decrease of points over time. This data can be seen here.

For the graphs we used Google Charts

You can check out the RTÉ CAO results tool here

 

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