sugarnetes Gradient

Main hub

Inspiration

We know many students prefer to study in groups, and seeing their peers at work pushes them to do the same. However many students begin to lose that motivation and can’t keep up with studying as they once did. While discussing how well gamification works we thought to create a collaborative study environment where users can track points to push them to keep up the hard work.
We also noticed that many students end up needing to type up their notes while trying to keep up with professors, causing them to create lengthy notes, using an LLM students can upload those notes and will receive concise and condensed topic summaries to improve study material.

What it does

This dashboard includes a timer from which users can select a study time, once the timer hits 0 meaning they studied the specified amount of time they receive points equal to the time spent. Users can see other friends on the leaderboard and where they stand amongst the users of the study room. Further, at the end of each session, users are prompted to take a break to promote healthy study habits. Users can upload a PDF of notes that they want to review and the dashboard will return a cleaner concise notes page highlighting important topics and providing valuable summaries.

How we built it

For the front end of our web app we used to react, we incorporated the different components of the user web page including a timer, a leaderboard, and a PDF upload spot. We have a Python backend utilizing Tornado and WebSocket to connect with the React endpoints and hosting an HTTP server. Firestore was used as our database management service.

Challenges we ran into

Working in a larger team we ran into many dependency issues in our collaborative code which resulted in a larger portion of our time being spent on reverting work or other attempts at fixing the issues.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The work we did with our LLM is something we are quite proud of, the results we got surpassed our expectations. Further using WebSockets to retrieve real-time data was also a huge milestone and enhanced our project.

What we learned

Each of us on this team had varying levels of skill we all took away something new from this 24-hour hackathon. Some of us got to experience using React for the first time. Others got to build their first client, and server application built from scratch. A few of us got our first taste of front-end development and styling. We each got to dive deep into GitHub version control.

What's next for sugarnetes Gradient

If we were to further advance this project we would hope to incorporate chat rooms to increase collaboration among users. Further to make the study sessions more fun and intriguing to users we would want to create avatars and credits that would be obtained based on points so users could upgrade their avatars as they study more. We'd also like to include the option for friendly competition, i.e. notifying other users that their study room peers have leveled up and so on. Finally, a to do list that each user could manage would improve utility.