Brought to You From the Department of CS50

The same people that brought you ShuttleBoy—before theweird call in thing—rolled out a new websiteHarvardMaps in conjunction with the Undergraduate Council today. The site, part of the CS 50 network and created by CS 50 Professor David Malan, is an attempt by the UC to begin streamlining room reservation systems in all the Undergraduate Houses and other locations across campus.

“Until today, there’s been no centralized place to find room reservation information for different buildings.” wrote Eric N. Hysen ’11, a UC rep and one of the compliers of the program. “We hope this will begin making it easier for students and student groups to reserve rooms for their events.” He added, “We’ll be working to expand on this with a searchable database of rooms on campus…our long term goal is a fully online, centralized reservation system for all buildings.”

Follow the jump for more on how the site works.

The site looks like any other map of Harvard’s campus because they were all created by CS50 with the sameinterface, but when you search for an item and then hit “enter” or click on your desired location, a bubble pops up identifying that location, with links for “website” and “room reservations.” The former links to the building’s main website (if it exists) and the latter links to the room reservation procedure page on that building’s site.

Fun surprise: if a building has a wikipedia page, the application will excerpt it to feed your wiki-obsession!

Like most UC innovations, this isn’t a perfect system. One still has to go through the several web pages to actually reserve a room, but FlyBy thinks its a start. “It’s an important start to solving the problem with room reservations on campus,” wrote Hysen. “Long term, the UC is pushing for a centralized online system to do the actual reservations.”

This site is one of a number of recent innovations the CS50 department has rolled out this year. Other gems include HarvardMaps for those of you know need a little navigational help, HarvardNews, and the slightly less gem-like but much appreciated HarvardEvents.

Never one to pass up a teachable moment, Malan says that the sites’ datasets are integrated into students’ final projects.

So reserve away, Harvard. We know you're dying to!