Building a university timetable can mean comparing dozens, even hundreds, of possible course combinations. A platform developed by Pooria Roy, CompSci ’27, aims to do that work automatically.
Roy created Qflow after finding it difficult to manually build a timetable before entering second year. The platform allows students to browse courses, verify prerequisites and corequisites, and generate conflict-free schedules while accounting for factors like travel between main and West Campus.
As of July 24, Qflow had 4,268 verified registered users —roughly one in five Queen’s undergraduate students — who had generated more than 56,000 schedules across 36 academic programs, according to statistics Roy shared with The Journal.
Roy is not alone in his effort to build a course selection site, with other students designing similar tools.
READ MORE: Student-built platform aims to simplify course selection at Queen’s
Roy said the original version of Qflow began as a personal coding project. With hundreds of possible timetable combinations, he wrote a program that automatically generated schedules.
After sharing the tool with friends, Roy found it was helpful for students whose programs offered many scheduling options.
“I realized that if it could help me, it could probably help everyone else,” he said in an interview with The Journal. “This year I decided to turn it into an interface so everyone could use it — not just people in Computing and Arts and Science.”
Today, any student can prioritize factors including the number of courses per semester, preferred days off, minimizing gaps between classes, and avoiding early morning lectures.
“You can say, ‘I don’t want any courses on Friday.’ It’ll see if that’s even possible,” Roy said.
Depending on the courses selected, Qflow can generate anywhere from a handful to thousands of possible timetables.
Students sign in using their Queen’s email address and choose their faculty when creating an account. Uploading a transcript is optional and is only used to verify completed courses when checking degree requirements, Roy said. Students can also manually enter the courses they’ve completed.
Roy emphasized that Qflow isn’t intended to replace SOLUS, but rather to help students plan potential schedules before confirming course times and availability through the University’s enrolment system.
To keep information current, Qflow reviews course offerings on SOLUS every four days and updates the platform accordingly. Even so, he encourages students to confirm course times and availability through SOLUS before enrolling.
One of Qflow’s main goals, Roy said, is helping students avoid common scheduling mistakes before their enrolment appointments begin.
For example, some full-year courses require students to stay in the same section across both semesters. Similarly, consecutive classes on West Campus and main campus may not leave enough travel time between lectures.
“SOLUS only tells you once you click enrol,” Roy said. “By then, SOLUS is already too slow to change any of your sections, and you don’t know what sections to change to because you’re doing it manually.”
The platform experienced its largest increase in activity after enrolment appointment times were released on July 13.
Health Sciences, Life Sciences, Computing, Commerce, and Concurrent Education account for the platform’s largest user groups, though according to Roy, students from nearly every faculty have registered.
Despite the platform’s growth, Roy said he has no plans to introduce a paid version.
“The whole goal of Qflow is to keep it free for students after I’m gone,” he said.
Roy said he currently funds the platform out of pocket, with monthly costs of about $120 for hosting and marketing. He estimated maintaining Qflow also requires roughly 20 hours of work each month, including updating course data, responding to user feedback, and making code changes,.
Roy said he is able to cover those expenses in part of because of his Schulich Leaders Scholarship, as Qflow does not generate any revenue.
He said maintaining the platform becomes more expensive as more students use it, particularly during course selection when thousands of schedules are generated simultaneously.
“I don’t want this to die,” Roy said. “I want it to stay free through whatever means necessary.”
Tags
Course selection, Qflow, schedule, SOLUS
All final editorial decisions are made by the Editor(s) in Chief and/or the Managing Editor. Authors should not be contacted, targeted, or harassed under any circumstances. If you have any grievances with this article, please direct your comments to eic@queensjournal.ca.