Blackboard

dashboard

Inspiration

University has been a really weird experience. My parents always warned me about being around "bad influences", like people who smoke, drink, do drugs, etc.

What they didn't know is the only peer pressure you really experience is sports betting.

I can't name a single person I know who doesn't own Kalshi or Polymarket. It got me thinking, what's the best way to make money off of this?

Instead of sketchy group chats or random betting apps, what if there was a campus-specific platform where you could “bet” on the everyday moments of university life?

Blackboard is a hyper-local prediction market just for your school. You can place bets on things that actually matter to students:

Will the average of the Physics exam be over 70%? How long will the dining hall line be at 12:15? Will it snow before midterms? Will the fire alarm go off in the dorm this weekend? And more!!

What it does

Blackboard is a hackathon-style web app for campus-scoped prediction markets. Students sign in, choose their university, and see boards (binary Yes/No questions) that only apply to their school—things like campus facilities, sports, or student-life events. The dashboard shows open boards, placeholder positions, and a detail view per board with consensus and a stub for future trading. It’s built as an MVP: demo data in code today, ready to plug into a real API and order flow later.

How I built it

Stack: Next.js 16 (App Router), React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS v4, Clerk (@clerk/nextjs) for auth.
Auth & routing: Clerk sign-in / sign-up, proxy.ts (Next 16’s replacement for middleware) to protect /dashboard and /onboarding.
Onboarding: After sign-up, users pick a school from a curated Midwest universities list; choice is stored in Clerk unsafeMetadata (universityId, universityName).
Data model (demo): lib/mock-boards.ts holds board rows keyed by schoolId; the dashboard filters by the user’s university. Board detail routes live at /dashboard/boards/[id] and reject cross-school IDs.