Inspiration
We were all once final-year students juggling thesis deadlines, clearance forms, and a dozen office visits. Hearing friends still battling the same chaos lit a fire—what if one portal could orchestrate the entire academic workflow? AcadFlow is our attempt to give future cohorts the experience we wish we’d had.
What it does
AcadFlow centralizes Final Year Project management and degree clearance. Students submit ideas, supervisors track reviews, examiners log evaluations, and administrators see real-time progress. Each role gets a tailored dashboard, live notifications, and a shared source of truth so no one is left guessing what happens next.
How we built it
We split into backend and frontend squads but kept a shared schema contract with Prisma. The backend (Node.js, Express, PostgreSQL) handles workflows, role-based auth, and audit trails. The frontend (Next.js, React, Tailwind) renders the dashboards and status timelines. Zustand powers lightweight state, while Swagger and seeded data kept integration tight during the hackathon crunch.
Challenges we ran into
- Mapping messy, human approval chains into deterministic state machines without losing flexibility.
- Keeping role-based permissions intuitive yet secure as we layered more actors (students, supervisors, examiners, offices).
- Balancing hackathon speed with the need for believable data seeding and useful analytics.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- A fully navigable multi-role demo: you can log in as a student, supervisor, or admin and actually complete workflows end-to-end.
- Real-time notification center that surfaces pending actions across FYP and clearance modules.
- Visual clearance tracker that mirrors the dreaded paper forms but with clarity and timestamps.
What we learned
Designing academic processes means respecting institutional nuance—every department had “one more step.” Prototyping those stages early with clickable UI saved us from backend rework. We also learned how powerful a single schema can be when everyone rallies around it.
What’s next for AcadFlow
- Plug into university SSO and document repositories to make rollouts realistic.
- Add analytics for workload forecasting and bottleneck alerts.
- Layer in messaging/notes so examiners and students can collaborate without leaving the portal.
- Package Docker images for zero-friction campus pilots.
Built With
- nextjs
- node.js
- postgresql
- prisma
- react
- shadcn
- swagger
- tailwind
- typescript
