AP Help Me

Inspiration

We were inspired by how confusing school resources can be for students. If you miss class, have a bad teacher, or just don’t understand a topic, it’s surprisingly hard to find honest information in one place. Especially as underclassmen, it's really difficult to decide what classes you want to take if you don't know many older kids. We wanted to create a tool that helps students make better decisions about their classes by combining teacher reviews and organized notes in a single, simple application.

What it does

Our project is an education-focused Python application that lets students select a subject, then choose between two options: Teacher Reviews or Notes. The Teacher button shows reviews and ratings for teachers who teach that class. The Notes button displays student-written notes and summaries for that class. The goal is to give students quick access to both academic help and real feedback, all in one place, without having to search across multiple platforms.

How we built it

We built the entire project using Python and Streamlit, and intentionally kept everything in one file as a minimum viable product (MVP). Streamlit allowed us to uickly create an interactive UI using buttons, dropdowns, and conditional rendering. All data is stored in Python data structures like dictionaries and lists. Based on user selections, Streamlit reruns the script and displays the appropriate content, which, made it easy to manage navigation without traditional routing or multiple files.

Challenges we ran into

One major challenge was handling app state in Streamlit, because the script reruns on every interaction. We had to be careful about how we tracked which subject and view (teacher vs. notes) the user was on. One more challenge was keeping the single-file structure readable while still supporting multiple features. Balancing simplicity with functionality, especially under hackathon time pressure, required a lot of quicktesting.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud that we built a fully working Streamlit app in a short amount of time using just one file. Despite the simplicity, the app still feels organized and intuitive. We feel that it can actually be helpful in a real-world context, and it should be used at many schools.

What we learned

We learned how Streamlit handles reruns and state, and how to use conditional logic to control what appears on the screen. We also learned how powerful simple Python data structures can be for prototyping real applications. Most importantly, we learned how to scope a project realistically for a hackathon and still deliver something complete.

What's next for AP Help Me

We want to split the app into multiple files and introduce persistent data storage, such as a database or external files. We’d also like to allow users to submit their own reviews and notes, add search and filtering, and improve the overall UI. We also wanted to add another page that has an AI chatbox to help students create plans to catch up on school work if they missed days. Teachers could upload what was missed and notes, and the chatbot will give personal feedback to the student based on that. Long-term, this could grow into a scalable platform. We wanted to get sponsors from companies that will allow us to give actual prizes to students who are getting points by submitting things on our site.

Built With

• python
• streamlit