SBJourney

Personalized Learning, tailored around your schedule and career goals.

Comment

Inspiration

Our inspiration came from a group of students who struggled during their freshman years to figure out their career goals. Not knowing the order of classes to take made it difficult to be as prepared compared to others. Therefore, we wanted to create an application that uses AI to create personalized study plans and detailed career tracks for the new generation of students coming to Stony Brook University.

What it does

Our application creates personalized study plans curated based on their familiarity with the topics and their learning styles. Students have the option to create these plans for any class that is offered at Stony Brook. In addition, they are able to get a visualized timeline for a certain career path that the student selects. This is based on mandatory courses, elective courses, and additional external resources that allow the students to be as prepared as possible.

How we built it

First, we gathered data from Stony Brook's undergraduate bulletin to get information about all courses offered using Python's Beautiful Soup library. With this information, we sent a request using the OpenAI API with information based on the students' personal learning choices and selected course information. After receiving a tailored study plan from OpenAI, we used the Gmail API and Nodemailer to send PDF versions of the study guides to the students themselves. After this, for the career path feature, we used JointJS to create a visualized timeline structure of all courses for the student's chosen career path using Stony Brook's courses. A UI was created to allow for easy access to users' study guides and career paths using the MERN Stack.

Challenges we ran into

There were a couple of challenges that we ran into when creating this application, one being using JointJS to create the visualized timeline structure due to the lack of documentation and the limited functionality that was allowed in the free version of the library. This made the process take longer as well as more difficult to implement the visualization. Another challenge was being able to complete the full project scope within the timeframe. As the hackathon progressed, it became more difficult to have productive work done on the application, but it was a great learning experience nonetheless. Being able to collaborate with each other to solve difficult problems and resolve conflicts made the experience very educational.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to implement many different technologies such as OpenAI, webscraping, and messaging. Being able to learn how to integrate many different technologies and problem solve with friends throughout the journey was something to be grateful for.

What we learned

We improved our ability to work collaboratively with teammates through the ideation and development process. We learned to effectively manage time and distribute work to others while working to help each other along the way.

What's next for SBJourney

We plan on adding more courses as well as adding more SUNY schools into the system. In addition, we are looking to create a more modern and easier-to-use UI, and possibly being able to take more specific input from users to be able to create a more personalized plan for the students.

Share this project:

Updates