StudyStacks

Welcome page
Study, Manage, and Connect
Add your own flashcards
Gamified Flashcards

Inspiration

We both have experience in game development through past personal projects, and wanted to take this opportunity to put our skills to the test to make a product that entertains while educating.

What it does

StudyStacks allows the user to register an account in order to build and save their own Stacks of flashcards. Students can use the AI Stack Expansion Tool when they want to quickly generate new study material that matches their current Stack's topic and style. Once ready to test their knowledge, students can Study their Stacks through a gamified multiple choice quiz. While studying, students are rewarded for correct answers, with damage dealt to a monster and, if they can keep their streak, a powerful spell. Altogether, StudyStacks engages students through a gamified reward system, in order to improve their studying habits.

How we built it

After attending the opening ceremony and seeing Windsurf's presentation, we were inspired to integrate Windsurf's IDE into our workflow for this project. Windsurf's integrated AI, Cascade, has been integral in streamlining our development to maximize efficiency within our limited time constraints. Alongside Windsurf, we used Auth0 to handle StudyStacks' authentication, which enabled us to focus on the crux of our project without worrying about the security of our logins. Furthermore, the database used in our project is MongoDB. Due to its ease of use and integration, we were able to quickly match user and flashcard data to tables in the database. Outside of the event sponsors, we employed Cohere AI's API to allow the user to generate flashcards related to their current sets.

On the software side, StudyStacks is handled through Python with Flask, Javascript, and HTML/CSS. Version control was handled through Git using Fork and was hosted on GitHub. Currently, both StudyStacks and MongoDB are run on a local server.

As for the assets, we got the monster image off of itch.io (under cc0 license) and we composed the battle theme in BeepBox.

Challenges we ran into

Over the course of this project, we ran into a few notable challenges, such as:

Setting up version control and syncing our work
Installing and connecting dependencies
Serious bugs that required reverts to previous versions

Accomplishments that we're proud of

In this project, we are proud to have:

Learnt how to setup Github, Git, and Fork for collaboration between multiple developers
Learnt how to use Windsurf, Auth0, and MongoDB, all for the first time.
Built a working prototype of a project with serious potential in less than two days.

What we learned

This weekend has been an incredible opportunity for our technical development, specifically with:

Github, Git, Fork
MongoDB
Auth0
API calls with Cohere
Windsurf & our first foray into prompt engineering
Flask in Python
HTML, CSS, and JS

What's next for StudyStacks

Our current prototype is built to be expanded upon with an interconnected network of flashcards. To achieve this, we would only need to have a cloud based server and database, which can be accomplished through MongoDB's paid tier. Once that is setup, users would be able to publish on a market by having their Stacks' flag set to public. With that interconnectivity would also come more room for an immersive multiplayer experience in Stack Duels. In these duels, players will be able to host one of their own decks for other players to stack up against them and prove their knowledge. In this mode, rather than fight a monster, players would go head-to-head until only the most studious among them remains.