An app originally launched at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2012 is coming to Auburn's campus to assist students in registration.
Joe Puccio is one of the co-founders of the app called Coursicle.
"My co-founder, Tara Aida, and I started Coursicle in 2012 and we've been working on it ever since," Puccio said. "I graduated from UNC Chapel Hill in May 2016 with degrees in math and computer science, and Tara graduated from Harvard University in May 2016 with degrees in math and physics."
Puccio said Coursicle is a tool that helps Auburn students with course registration.
"We just released an app that allows students to receive notifications as soon as a seat opens up in a class they need to take," Puccio said. "Coursicle also offers a schedule planner, which allows students to easily browse classes and plan their schedule."
Creating the app was inspired by Puccio's own struggles with class registration from the time he was a freshman in college.
"When I was an incoming first-year at UNC, I spent several hours trying to plan out my class schedule, and then when I finally went to register for my classes I got into only one of the five I needed to take," Puccio said. "So that night, I started working on a program that would text me when a class I wanted had an available seat."
Puccio said he didn't consider opening the program up to other students until a friend suggested he did.
"At the end of the registration period about 900 students had signed-up," Puccio said. "The next semester, 1,800 students had signed up, and it just kept growing by word of mouth."
A few months after the spread of Puccio's program, Aida suggested expanding on his original idea.
"My now co-founder Tara suggested we try to solve the other side of registration: the arduous process of figuring out what classes to take and trying to fit them all into a non-overlapping schedule," Puccio said. "Part of the reason this task is so arduous is because the software the university provides to search for classes is usually very outdated and tedious to use."
Making an app rather than a text message service was a logical next step, Puccio said.
"Coursicle really came out of a pain that we, as well as our friends, were experiencing while we were students," Puccio said. "Due to increased demand for our text service last semester, we started sending so many texts Verizon started blocking us, we had to switch over to an iOS and Android app to do notifications."
The app has also launched at schools such as Notre Dame, Brown, Clemson, UNC Wilmington, UNC Charlotte, Temple and Perdue.
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