API - A Prehistoric Island

Landing Page 1
Landing Page 2
Ancient Scrolls
Quest for Campus Embers
Dino Laws

🦕 Inspiration

College life can feel like being dropped into a mysterious prehistoric jungle - full of chaos, hunger, unknown rules, hidden chances, and the occasional Testu-Rex. We wanted to build a mysterious amazing web application that offers games and tools to make campus life easier and a tad more prehistoric for our fellow students.

So we asked ourselves:

"What if there was a prehistoric island - API (you see it right?) - where students could keep track of their healthy achievements, be protected knowing essential rules, and spark inspiration from complex, lengthy materials - but at the same time feeling like they are taking part in an epic quest?"

That (and a LOT of caffein) is how API: A Prehistoric Island was born. A world that’s easy for even cavemen, built by future tech wizards.

🧭 What it does

API, apart from you-know-what, also stands for Achievement, Protection, and Inspiration—the three pillars behind our 3 star features:

Quest for Campus Embers

A gamified campus quest where students turns into Hunters, Gatherers and Trackers, earn fiery streaks and top the Lava Leaderboard by checking in regularly with healthy habits like exercises and nutritious diet.

DinoLaws

Drop the location, and it gives you a simple, funny explanation of must-know laws and campus rules tailored to the area, should it be UMD, Hogwarts or even your backyard! So simple even a caveman could understand. Read by the caveman himself.

Ancient Scrolls

Upload your study notes or docs, and it’ll summarize them and even suggest creative project ideas. Students will leave chasing opportunities and with a voiceover guiding them on.

🛠️ How we built it

Frontend: HTML/CSS/JavaScript/Python with prehistoric-themed visuals and animations

Backend: Python with FastAPI, deployed on an AWS EC2 (Amazon Linux) instance

AI Magic: Powered by Gemini 1.5 Pro for ultra-fast and smart responses

Voice + Animation: Synced Terp’s caveman narration with scroll animations and sound FX

Version Control: GitHub + pure survival instincts

It’s all lively, and purely Jurassic

🪨 Challenges we ran into

Rate Limits: Gemini got too close to daily quotas (just like us) when too many requests were called. We built smart testing strategies and alternating between models to utilize daily requests.

Lack of Experience: One of the team members has zero experience with web/backend/frontend/full stack development, yet through sheer delulu, the hackathon resources and the kind help of their teammates, pulled of the DinoLaws feature!

Voice Syncing: Making the caveman’s voice match the scroll carving animation took a lot of fine-tuning (and some mammoth-level patience).

Theme Cohesion: Balancing humor with actual usability took several iterations. We had to make sure it wasn’t just all jokes—it had to bring meaningful benefits and smiles to our users' faces too.

Thinking Back: We were too focus on moving forward that we forgot to include the Back (to main page) buttons in our features. A valuable lesson that will never grow old.

🏆 Accomplishments that we're proud of

Fully deployed full-stack mini functions that combines to a single unified product with user benefits close to our hearts

Was not afraid to shot for the moon and in this case, at meteors too!

Made project brainstorming fun, walks in the rain productive, minds strong and friendships happen

Developed a consistent theme with an easy to navigate, playful UI/UX that goes hand in hand with the hackathon's atheistic

Learned new tools and APIs handling mid-hackathon and still finished strongly and proudly

Actually made other hackers smiled during testing 👀

📚 What we learned

How to quickly create and deploy full-stack mini services to AWS

Leverage and have fun with Google Gemini APIs

How to write good prompts for that mix clarity, humor, and usefulness

That great UI/UX isn’t just about art or design - it’s about sympathizing with our users

A little humor goes a long way when solving real life pain points

You can wear more than one hats, which has been shown to us when the sponsors and alumni mingle with hackers to conquer problems and fight bugs together, and massive respect to our many volunteers!!! Your smiles and support kept us going.