🚂 BoilerDay — AI-Optimized Purdue Day Planner

Your classes. Your tasks. Your life. One AI prompt. Your entire Purdue day — built.

🏆 Tracks & Awards

Boiler Builds — Built exclusively for Purdue University students
Best Use of Claude — Claude is the brain of the entire product, not just a feature
Most Polished Product — Full React Native app, Purdue black & gold design, gamified UX

💡 Inspiration

Every Purdue student knows the feeling: you have classes scattered across campus, a pile of homework, no idea where to eat, and you're wasting 20 minutes just figuring out your day before it even starts.

We wanted to fix that. Not with a to-do app. Not with a calendar widget. With an AI that actually thinks about your day — knows the Purdue campus, knows your classes, knows how long it takes to walk from WALC to Earhart, and builds you a minute-by-minute schedule that makes sense.

BoilerDay was born in WALC 3087 on a Saturday morning with two hours on the clock.

🔧 What It Does

BoilerDay is a mobile app that takes everything about your day — your Google Calendar, your tasks, your dietary preferences, your study habits, your gym schedule, your sleep time — and hands it to Claude, which reasons over all of it to generate a fully optimized, minute-by-minute Purdue day.

Here's what you get:

Intelligent scheduling — Claude identifies the best study windows between your classes, clusters dining and gym trips to minimize walking, and builds a realistic day that fits your actual life
Purdue-specific recommendations — specific building rooms, dining hall stations, study spot floors (e.g. "WALC 3rd floor quiet zone"), and walking shortcuts Claude knows about Purdue's campus
Walking time optimization — activities are grouped geographically so you're not criss-crossing campus all day
Gamified progress — check off tasks to earn Boiler XP, level up from Freshman Boilermaker to Purdue Legend, and watch your day progress bar fill in real time
Lifestyle-aware — dietary prefs, workout preferences, wind-down rituals (sunset walk on Slayter Hill, anyone?), and target sleep time all factor into the output

🛠️ How We Built It

Frontend

React Native (Expo) — runs on iOS and Android from a single codebase
@react-navigation/bottom-tabs for the Form ↔️ My Day navigation
react-native-reanimated for the XP pop animation and progress bar transitions
expo-google-fonts with Space Grotesk + DM Mono for the Purdue black & gold aesthetic

AI Layer

Claude Sonnet 4 (claude-sonnet-4-20250514) called directly from the app — no backend
Heavily engineered system prompt that gives Claude deep Purdue campus knowledge: buildings, dining halls, study spots, walking times, insider tips
Claude responds with structured JSON — a full day schedule with typed blocks (class, study, food, gym, walk, free, sleep_prep), XP values, locations, and walking segments
User prompt is dynamically assembled from calendar data + tasks + all lifestyle preferences

Integrations (designed, partially implemented)

Google Calendar API — OAuth to read today's classes and events
Google Tasks API — sync today's to-do list
Google Maps JS API — walking routes between buildings on campus
Manual text input fallback for all integrations (fully working without OAuth)

Architecture

No backend. Zero servers. All API calls from the app directly.
Anthropic API key + Google keys hardcoded for hackathon demo.

😤 Challenges We Ran Into

Getting Claude to output clean JSON consistently — we spent real time on the system prompt to prevent Claude from wrapping the JSON in markdown or adding preamble. The key was being extremely explicit: "Respond ONLY with a valid JSON object. No markdown, no explanation."
Google OAuth in React Native — expo-auth-session with Google has a lot of edge cases around redirect URIs and token scopes. We built a robust manual-input fallback so the demo always works even if OAuth isn't configured.
Fitting 2 hours of work into 2 hours — we scoped hard. The Claude integration and gamification system were non-negotiable. Maps and live dining data are V2.
Typography on mobile — getting Space Grotesk and DM Mono loading correctly across iOS/Android with expo-google-fonts took more debugging than expected.

🏅 Accomplishments We're Proud Of

Claude genuinely knows Purdue. It suggests the WALC 3rd floor for deep focus, recommends cutting through the engineering fountain to get to PMU faster, and knows that CoRec is near the stadium. This took real prompt engineering to achieve.
The gamification system is complete end-to-end — XP accumulates, levels up with Purdue-flavored titles, and the animated XP pop on task completion genuinely feels satisfying.
The app design looks and feels like a real product, not a hackathon prototype. Purdue black and gold, custom typography, dark cards, gold accents throughout.
We built a working React Native app, a full Claude integration, and a polished UI in under 2 hours.

📚 What We Learned

Claude is remarkably good at spatial and logistical reasoning when given the right context. Giving it Purdue-specific knowledge in the system prompt unlocked schedule outputs that felt genuinely local and useful — not generic.
Structured JSON output from Claude is powerful but requires careful prompt design. The simpler and more explicit the instruction, the more reliable the output.
Scoping ruthlessly is a superpower at a hackathon. We cut Maps, live dining, and OAuth from the first build and shipped something that worked and looked great.

🔭 What's Next

V2 — Campus Expansion

Live dining hall menus via Purdue's dining API
Real-time CoRec occupancy data
Purdue bus + CityBus route integration
Weather-aware schedule adjustments

V3 — Social & Teams

Study group coordination — share your day with friends
Friend XP leaderboards (who's grinding harder?)
Club and org event auto-import from Boilerlink
Group study spot suggestions based on everyone's schedule

V4 — AI Goes Deeper

Long-term GPA optimization mode — Claude plans your whole semester
Exam prep intensity planner based on syllabus difficulty
Multi-day week view generated by Claude
Expand to all Big Ten campuses

Ultimate vision: BoilerDay becomes the AI-native student operating system — the one app that thinks with you, every single day at Purdue.

🧰 Built With

React Native · Expo · Claude Sonnet 4 · Anthropic API · Google Calendar API · Google Tasks API · Google Maps JS API · Space Grotesk · DM Mono · react-native-reanimated · expo-auth-session