AcaMapa (updated to year 2025-2026)

A Web App that helps McGill students plan their degree

a HUGE THANK to @EvEnzyme for ideation, UX, writups and mental supports :)

🎥 Screenshots

📌 Motivation

As a McGill student, I often find it frustrating to plan my degree:

I had to jump between different webpages (course descriptions, program requirements) and keep my own notes in Google Docs or text files, which I would eventually lose the following year.
It was hard to figure out which electives I could take based on the courses I had already completed.
Finding courses and programs that actually matched my interests was even harder.
Existing tools like myProgress and VSB serve different purposes, but neither made long-term planning easy.

AcaMapa addresses these issues by crawling and parsing program/course information and offering a visual, drag-and-drop planning experience that’s both simple and flexible.

✨ Features

Find & pin your program(s)
- Add required and complementary courses directly from the parsed results.
Plan your degree semester by semester
- Reorder and organize terms and courses with simple drag-and-drop.
- Add extra or missing courses into terms through search.
- Explore future electives directly from course cards and dive deeper into areas of interest.
Validate your plan with requirement checks
- Courses are shown in green if all requirements are satisfied and red if not.
- Requirements are validated against pre-, co-, and anti-requisites.
- Supported requirement types include:
 1. AND: COMP 206 AND COMP 302
 2. OR: COMP 202 OR COMP 250
 3. Select two from a list: Two from COMP 206, COMP 302, COMP 250, COMP 330
 4. Credit-based: 12 credits from COMP at 300-level or higher
- You can overwrite a course’s requirements to mark it as satisfied.
- Equivalent checks (e.g. COMP 252 vs COMP 251) are supported by custom rules, they count towards pre-requisites, co-requisites, and restrictions.
- Add completed courses to Courses Taken to provide context for prerequisite checks across all plans.
- Create multiple plans aiming at different programs or degrees.
- Inspect plan statistics, including total credits and average credits per term, to better evaluate your workload.
Validate in VSB
- Terms indicated with red triangle (current term) or red circle (term in current academic year) can be checked in VSB
Share with others
- Export plans as PNG images, including stats and courses taken, to share with academic advisors or fellow students.
- Import exported plans from the embedded QR codes, plan based on previous experiances!
Save your plans
- Plans are stored locally and persist across page refreshes.
- Plans can be stored as the exported image.
Localization
- English is fully supported.
- French support is included but still needs refinement — contributions are welcome! Open an issue if you’d like to help.
~~AI (Deprecated)~~
- ~~Semantic search (RAG) for programs and courses based on your interests.~~
- ~~Automated plan generation tailored to your workload preferences.~~
- ~~Enhanced subsequent course search: recommendations based on your entire plan, not just a single course.~~

📣 Note: AcaMapa might be useful for students at other schools too! If you’d like to adapt this tool to your university, it mainly requires preparing a MongoDB database with your school’s program and course information. Open an issue to get in touch!

🛠️ Tech Stack

Frontend & Backend: Next.js, MongoDB, Redux Toolkit, Hello-pangea/dnd
Auth & Email: Auth.js, Resend
AI (incoming): MongoDB Atlas, LangGraph

⚙️ Environment Variables

Add the following to your .env:

ANALYZE="false"
APP_HOST="0.0.0.0"
APP_PORT="3030"
DOMAIN="your.domain"
MONGODB_DATABASE_NAME="a MongoDB Database that implements the interface"
MONGODB_URI="URI to your MongoDB Database"
USE_DIFF_SYNC="0"
# I used upstash redis, optional for yours
UPSTASH_KV_REST_API_READ_ONLY_TOKEN=
UPSTASH_KV_REST_API_TOKEN=
UPSTASH_KV_REST_API_URL=
UPSTASH_KV_URL=
UPSTASH_REDIS_URL=
USER_DATABASE_NAME="auth"

MongoDB files: open an issue to contact me, and I’ll share the parsed results.

🚀 Quick Start

# Clone the repo
git clone https://github.com/MichaelangJason/AcaMapa.git

# Install dependencies
pnpm install   # or npm install

# Setup Husky & lint-staged
pnpm prepare   # or npm prepare

# Run in dev mode
pnpm dev

# Build & start
pnpm build
pnpm start

🗺️ Roadmap

[x] Local degree planning with drag & drop
[x] Current Academic Year + Check viability in VSB
[x] Import from JSON/image (exported by this app)
[x] Equivalent course check
[x] UI refinement
[ ] Automatic updater(crawler) of Courses and Programs
[ ] ~~Remote plan saving with McGill login (deprecated)~~
[ ] ~~AI-powered program & course search (deprecated)~~
[ ] ~~Automated plan generation (workload-based) (deprecated)~~

📄 License

Apache 2.0

AcaMapa

Install / Use

README