List of CAS activities
BetterBAC's task calendar
Home Page and UI

Inspiration

Complaints about manageBAC are common at our school, with swathes of Y1 and Y2 Diploma students criticizing the platform for its janky UI and frequent crashes. As diploma candidates ourselves, we are (unfortunately) becoming well acquainted with the ineptitudes of the program, and we wanted to create a solution that didn't require coding an entirely new LMS. So when we saw that there was an opportunity to create something that would improve our community, we all simultaneously knew what we had to do.

What it does

BetterBAC is the new haven for all IB students! Things like making and storing CAS reflections and organising schedules are all managed and simplified through the app, removing the stress from time and CAS management. When you open the app, you're greeted with a welcome tour that guides you through how to use each of the app's functions, starting with the CAS manager.

Instead of having to type straight into ManageBAC -- which frequently crashes -- to report your experiences, you can do them all from BetterBAC. BetterBAC allows the experiences to be dictated through your keyboard, which saves time and increases the quality of the reflection. Stuck? Our built-in AI helper can give guidance on where to start with logging your experience and will also give you feedback on how to strengthen your summary. From there, all you have to do is click "Import reflection", and your full experience will show up, straight in the ManageBAC app!

Additionally, BetterBAC has a simple calendar system that helps students keep an eye on their workloads. If one particular week you happen to have a project, quiz, and five assignments due, ManageBAC will display the intensity of that week, and you can prepare for it accordingly. When you finish assignments, you can check them off and watch as your week gets a bit easier.

Finally, our gamified UI turns IB work from a chore to a challenge. Drawing inspiration from Duolingo's UI, BetterBAC rewards students with XP for finishing assignments, reflections, and just logging in. Students can also work towards badges to show how on top of it they are!

How we built it

During our brainstorm phase, we had some general ideas for what the app should entail. We all agreed that the UI should be based on that of Duolingo's, as its simplistic and playful feel doesn't overstimulate its users, and its game-based layout incentivizes frequent interaction. From there, we fine-tuned our ui items, creating reusable ChunkyButtons dart widgets that encompasses its child in a playful, obvious button.

Challenges we ran into

Although we had our minds set on utilizing rust for the core logic, due to its memory safety and rock hard type system, the inter-op tool we used, flutter-rust-bridge, has a steep learning curve in order to tie a static typed compiled language to a dynamically typed interpreted one like dart. One of the issues we encountered were not being able to send Vec<Vec<String>>s to the browser, instead we had to wrap it in a struct.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The biggest accomplishment in our books is how much we can potentially help IB students across the world. A quick demo of our software at our school was an instant success, with multiple students vowing that, as soon as the app was publicly released, they would start using it. This small but significant impact on our local community excited us with the idea that our app would be able to help more than just a small public school in Redwood City. We could potentially impact a global community of IB scholars, and that realization in itself was, in a way, the biggest and best accomplishment of this whole project. Focusing on more code-related wins,

What we learned

We learned to use native Apple APIs in Flutter, including Foundation Models. We learned to use MethodChannel, where we can define code that runs when we call dart's invokeMethod. In a more person-oriented sense, we learned to respectfully take in the suggestions of users of our app and implement them in a feasible way.

What's next for BetterBAC

The most beautiful thing about BetterBAC is that it doesn't just affect a small group of kids in Redwood City; it has the potential to assist a global community of learners. Regardless of our placement in this competition, we plan to bring BetterBAC to a global stage. We aim to increase its capabilities to include note storage, canvas synchronisation, and specialised forums for IB scholars around the world. Additionally, one of our other long-term goals is to extend the capabilities of the app so that it can connect with other CAS LMSs such as Notion, Seesaw, and Toddle.