When McCormick junior Kevin Wang was registering for Winter Quarter classes in the fall, he asked himself what the worst-looking web interface was.
CAESAR, the platform NU students use to register for courses, immediately came to mind.
That very night, he created a prototype using Claude Code for what would become Pencil, a Chrome extension that provides “a more powerful CTEC viewer” in CAESAR.
The extension allows users to look at information about classes like ratings, student comments, capacity and enrollment numbers. It also enables students to add classes to their shopping cart without opening multiple tabs.
Pencil can replace CAESAR’s search screen with its “sharper class search,” a search box where students can look up classes by subject, course number and keywords in one place.
While Wang first started the project last November, he said he began seriously developing Pencil in late April.
“If I made a solution for myself, why not just let other people use it?” Wang said
McCormick junior Jason Latz joined him about two weeks ago, helping code and market the extension on social media.
When students click on certain functions in CAESAR, Latz said, the program receives messages to start a job. Pencil sends the messages more efficiently, he said.
“We’re just taking all the envelopes you would have sent to CAESAR and sending them easier, so that you don’t have to walk to the mailbox 800 times,” Latz said.
However, Pencil will not work if students do not have access to CTECS. The extension also does not hold on to user data, Latz said.
Fixes and new functions are coming to Pencil on a rolling basis as students provide feedback, Wang said.
As the course registration period continues, Latz said the two announced “a week of pencil.nu,” where new features are released every day, on the student social media platform Fizz.
The pair has already added tools like a combination function, where students can generate schedules with courses they have added to Paper, a course-scheduling tool founded by Dilan Nair (McCormick ’24). After finding that their first choice name, dressing.nu, was unavailable, Latz said they decided to go with Pencil as a complement to Paper.
With Google Calendar integration from Paper, Pencil also includes a “Lazy Mode” that tracks how many hours a student would spend in class to create the “laziest schedules” — those that minimize time spent in class each week.
McCormick first-year Kate Wheatley said she used Pencil to create a four-year plan for classes. She said her favorite thing about the program is the combinations function, which allows her to visualize different flows of the day.
“It’s actually magical,” Wheatley said.
She said the extension has introduced to her versions of schedules she never thought she could have.
McCormick first-year Elliott Yoder said Pencil cut down 90% of the time he used to take finding classes on CAESAR.
“Using Pencil took some of the stress out of planning my future courses, because it took less time,” Yoder said. “It eased the burden of searching through CTECs.”
Wang and Latz are working on Pencil without compensation and said positive feedback from students keeps them going.
Wang said he has always written software that fixes people’s niche problems in order to save time. Latz added that he just wants to help students.
“If every single Northwestern student improved the Northwestern experience in just one way, this would be a completely different school,” Latz said.
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