benkyou.

Inspiration

As students ourselves taking subjects like commerce or humanities, we found that it can be easy to get lost in theory, and many courses don't actively connect content to current events. However, when we do see the real world implications, we can better understand the impact of our studies, and so we wanted to make this easier for students.

What it does

benkyou is an app that helps further student learning by gathering articles along with relevant concepts they are currently studying. At a high level, this is done through user input and searches, where we can apply filters to narrow down our search. The website also includes basic user authentication and login.

How we built it

We built this by taking news from various sources, then categorising based on predefined keywords into topics such as "Mergers and Acquisitions", "Game Theory", "Inflation" etc. Students then have the option of exporting results they've collected into an Anki compatible format (Heading, Concepts) to recognise quicker what topics are covered in each news headline.

Features include:

Basic login and user authentication
Onboarding preferences
News age, Concepts and subject filter
Export Anki compatible format

What we used

We used Tailwind CSS, vanilla JavaScript for the front-end and FastAPI for the back-end, then deployed the app on Vercel.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We successfully built and deployed a functional, interactive study tool using Tailwind and FastAPI. Delivering a working product within such a short timeframe, while also adapting to an entirely new programming language, strengthened our problem-solving skills and fostered strong teamwork. The process of deploying the app and watching our ideas materialise into a live product was an incredibly rewarding experience. We’re also proud to have learnt so much about Tailwind and FastAPI and being able to incorporate it into a real project was a valuable experience.

What's next for benkyou.

In the future, we could expand the subject range and the articles and news sites covered by our MVP. We hope to implement AI in providing more accurate tags and concepts to each article, as well as acting as a tutor to the student. We also aim to properly authenticate our users as well as provide further customisation to user profiles.