Inspiration
My teammate and I are full-time students, so we have both had to use, and hate, Blackboard a lot.
What it does
B+ (pronounced Blackboard Plus) integrates with the native Blackboard UI, providing a host of study tools, accessibility features, and time-management/calendar interactions. These include AI-integrated practice problems drawn from the course textbook, read-aloud and dictation through Eleven Labs, grade estimators, and more.
How we built it
We scraped data from the Blackboard UI, indexed it in a local database and parsed some files with Tesseract OCR, and used a GBE model and keyword-matching to feed relevant content and context to a lightweight Gemini interface.
Challenges we ran into
Blackboard is very very unhappy about people scraping data, so we had to get crafty about working around all it's layers of nested UI.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are most proud of defeating Blackboard's convoluted and cryptic file systems!
What we learned
We learned a whole lot about text recognition and databases, that's for sure.
What's next for B+
We hope to make B+ a proper extension available on the Chrome Web Store soon! Bug fixes await.
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