Inspiration

With our final exams scheduled for the week right after this hackathon, we are currently living the exact problem we wanted to solve. While preparing for exams, we realized that juggling multiple disjointed apps for studying, scheduling, and grades becomes tedious and a distraction. Furthermore, the pressure to succeed often leads to severe student burnout. We wanted to build a single, centralized "umbrella" app that brings together tools that we made ourselves. Having everything organized in one site keeps students on task. Finally, we wanted our app to actively support the physical and mental well-being of students.

What it does

Our platform tackles student success from three points: Keeps students on track (Focus): Using MediaPipe's open-source facial tracking API, we integrated a smart webcam timer that tracks a student's gaze and attention during study sessions. By displaying the ratio of actual time focused versus total time spent, students get actionable data on their study habits and learn when they are truly productive. Keeps students organized (Academics): We built a centralized calendar where students can manage their schedules and receive automated reminders for upcoming assessments. To reduce finals anxiety, we also integrated a specialized grade calculator that tracks completed tests and predicts exactly what score a student needs on an upcoming exam to achieve their target final grade. Finally we implemented a feature where students are able to import their schedules from google calendar. Keeps students healthy (Well-being): You cannot achieve good marks without good health. Our app pushes active reminders to ensure students are hydrating and getting to sleep on time rather than pulling counterproductive all-nighters. Supporting a student's mental health is built directly into our platform as another stepping stone towards success.

How we built it

Our app was mainly divided into three sections; education, calendar, and health. It just so happened that we had three team members. So, we split our work into the three categories and collaborated on all the problems we faced. The bulk of our work was researching what API’s we needed and how to implement them into our app. After which, we learned from online resources and coded our website designs in html. Finally, we polished each other's sections to make sure all aspects of our app were what we wanted.

Challenges we ran into

As this was the first hackathon for our entire team, we faced a steep learning curve. Although we had basic prior experience with GitHub, working simultaneously in a high-pressure environment led to complex merge conflicts and corrupted files early on. However, we didn't let this stop us. By reaching out to more experienced mentors and diving into documentation, we established a solid version control foundation. We are proud to say we are walking away from this hackathon highly proficient in Git workflows.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Building a Functional Focus Tracker: We successfully integrated facial-tracking technology into a web environment. Despite having never even heard about API’s, we researched throughout the entire night to master it. By morning, we were able to find a public API that we imported, customized, and tuned. Through lots of trial and error, we changed the API to calculate a focus score based on the position of your facial features, and detect objects such as your phone that could be distracting you. Overcoming the struggles of GitHub: We were very proud of how we navigated our Git issues, despite it being the first time. We encountered many merge collisions and unfortunately lost some progress. However, through more hard work and learning, we successfully created and merged our features from all three of our devices, into one unified repo. From there, we could all access it little by little as we made incremental polishing efforts to finish our project.

What's next for this project

We designed this platform to be an "umbrella" tool, meaning the foundation is perfectly set to scale. Though we were limited by token usage, we plan on building out unique, specialized study tools (such as generative quizzes or a chat box that discusses your notes) that can live within the dashboard. Currently, we rely on three different external APIs. But, as our technical skills continue to grow, we were thinking about training and deploying our own custom machine learning model directly into the backend, reducing our reliance on third-party APIs and increasing user privacy.