The Study Companion

Inspiration

Being current Computer Science undergraduates, we are always looking for new ways to maximize our limited time. Hence, we decided to work on the topic of productivity as we wanted to increase students’ efficiency to ensure that students like us are able to achieve a good work-life balance that we all wish to have. As a group of 4, we came to an agreement that memory work requires the largest proportion of time during our studies, thus we created a mobile application to help students with memory work. After doing research, we realised that the main problem of memory work for students is that cramming information at the last minute for tests often fails. In fact, an article written by BBC where they quoted research by Nate Kornell at the University of California, Los Angeles, states that spacing out learning was more effective than cramming for 90% of the participants while 72% of the participants thought that cramming had been more beneficial. Therefore, our mobile application builds on the idea of constant repetition over time to enhance memory performance.

What it does

Our mobile application has two basic functions:

The notes input function acts as flashcards.
The memory function that helps users to remember the information they have written into the mobile application. In the notes input function, we have two subfunctions: the question-and-answer function and the paragraph function. For the question-and-answer function, users can type in questions that they find important for the subject and the corresponding answer. In the paragraph function, users are able to input paragraphs that they are required to remember. After these inputs have been filled, the memory function then generates notifications at constant time intervals where they will test the user with either the questions or fill in the blank type of questions, where the paragraphs they have entered have certain words blanked out. To help with organisation, the question and answers and paragraphs are neatly grouped into their different subjects as seen on the main page. Lastly, all the information typed in by the user is saved into Google’s firebase hence the user need not worry about losing any of their notes.

How we built it

We decided to build the mobile application using Flutter for our frontend and Firebase for our backend.

Challenges we ran into

As none of our group members are well-versed in frontend programming, we had some difficulty designing the application UI. It was also our first time using Flutter and Firebase, thus we had to spend quite some time learning how to use these software in the short time frame given.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of being able to produce a working mobile application in less than 1 day, despite not having much prior knowledge on how to do it. We are also proud of being able to connect the backend to our frontend, allowing us to save information into our database.

What we learned

We definitely learned how to develop software, and how to work together well as a team.

What's next for The Study Companion

Since our app is built on Flutter and Firebase, we hope to be able to expand our app to utilize more of the software. We believe that we are able to improve our application by including machine learning tools to analyze students' notes, such that the system can automatically generate questions for the students in more effective ways. We also want to create an interface for teachers to use our application by allowing them to input notes and practice questions for their students. With this, we hope to produce more efficient and effective memorization tools and techniques for students to learn better.