Ascendia - RPG for your College Assignments

Aurelius mascot
Sidebar navigation tab
Sign up page
Quests (Assignments) page
Leaderboard page
Log in page
Shop page
Landing page
Homepage/dashboard
Aurelius AI chatbot page
Select character page

Inspiration

We wanted to make doing assignments more inspiring for students and reduce procrastination habits by implementing gamified logic of a reward system for every time a student finishes their assignments.

What it does

This platform connects to students' Canvas and gives XP for completing assignments on time and extra bonus if submitted early. Students are decentivized from submitting late assignments or missing them because of point reductions. Students are encouraged to do better and compete with their peers in a non-toxic manner by being able to view an anonymous school leaderboard. There are also coins that the student can earn by completing assignments/quests and then buy in-app add-ons for their profile picture.

How we built it

This project is Vite.js for the frontend and uses Firebase for the Database. The backend was developed using Python. The UI was all modeled using Figma and strategic mood planning to ensure the site feels like a game and inspires students to compete.

Challenges we ran into

We struggled with time management during the short hackathon period and being able to complete the project to our full potential during the time frame while managing other responsibilities. We also faced a lot of errors in the code while implementing the Canvas API.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the UI design that our team collectively worked on because it looks very clean, professional, and it is very usable. The design reflects the websites goal of making assignments feel like a fun game rather than something to push off, while also keeping full functionality and efficiency without too many gamelike distractions from the assignments themselves.

What we learned

We learned a lot about how to design a full site with various different pages. We also have never worked with the Canvas API so that was a great experience to learn how to integrate and use different data to create the profiles. As beginners in programming, many of our team members were able to explore vibecoding and the functionality/benefits of that in creating projects and expanding on them manually within a short time span.

What's next for Ascendia - RPG for your College Assignments

With many features that the short time span did not allow for, we plan to implement an AI chatbot mascot, Aurelius, in the website that students can interact with which gives students motivational advice such as how many/which assignments they would need to complete in order to move up in ranking. We also would like to expand this idea into a Canvas extension so that students can view their XP and leaderboards in their Canvas directly instead of having to log into a separate site. We would also like to improve the reward system by providing more cosmetics in the shop and adding more short-term competitions/badges to allow students to compete further by week.