During their first year, most students at the University of Florida become familiar with Smoking Notes. Although it can be beneficial, it comes with two significant drawbacks: limited class coverage and a narrow, single source viewpoint. We recognized a significant fact: UF is rich with brilliant students who excel at note taking.Why depend solely on a single curated source when we can leverage the collective intelligence of our student community? This concept inspired the creation of Flaming Notes; after all, where there's smoke, there is a Flame. We aimed to create a platform that increases influence, encourages collaboration, and enhances efficiency, allowing more students to learn together.
Flaming Notes is a collaborative academic platform that collates course notes from various sources and arranges them accordingly: Notes submitted by students and materials provided by professors (lectures, outlines and readings). Greater than on any informal basis by simply submitting notes from themselves, the student will receive a cleaned up master note created from the entire collected group of note submissions for use as the foundation for your study or see the diferences between their notes and the collective notes of other students (in case they are missing anything). Rather than being able to cut and paste your way type of answers, your way of learning is directed to reinforcing concepts and finding where you have gaps. Student submissions are further incentivized by an additional feature: It is the indication of what was submitted by the student, and what they have missed from the group compared with the total of the submitted notes of all submitted students, which will allow them to catch up if they have missed the lecture or did not understand a specific concept. Flaming Notes works to ensure the integrity of the material submitted by utilizing anti plagiarism cleaning techniques, to preserve the academic integrity of the students.
One of the most important challenges we faced was finding ways to limit cheating while still providing valuable learning experiences. We worked hard to develop sanitizing and outputting rules for the system to allow learning while not replacing it. A second challenge was maintaining data consistency (e.g. for all uploads, quiz attempts, and leaderboard calculations) as the number of features grew and expanded during a hackathon time frame. The final challenge for us was to coordinate the backend logic with the frontend and quiz systems, which required us to create clear contracts and lots of debugging under significant time constraints.
This project taught us how to: Design fair incentive systems that promote contribution, use database aggregation to gain valuable insights, how to balance AI assistance with academic integrity, the importance of having clear backend boundaries when team members are working simultaneously on different features (frontend, quizzes, and analytics) of a product, in addition, we gained the experience of integrating AI into education in a responsible manner.
It was built so that whenever you create a commit and push to the remote repo, github runs the docker to make sure it compiles. To run you just use docker compose up -d --build and then it should appear on localhost:5173. This is how you run the backend. For front end, just write npm run dev and it gives a link to the local hosting, and starts the dev server for hosting on the front end.
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