Canvas Plus

Inspiration

Canvas is an important part of many students lives and Canvas Plus is hoping to improve their understanding. AI can be a very helpful tool but has led to many instances of academic dishonesty. We aimed to create a chrome extension that allows students to get up to date information regarding their assignments and grades while also giving them the ability to get advice on their studies.

How we built it

We used the Canvas API to get relevant assignment and grade data that was then used with the Gemini API to give relevant support to all students. We wanted this application to be represented as a chrome extension as it allows students ease of use at any point of their day. The front-end of our extension was made with HTML/CSS/JS allowing a vanilla experience.

Challenges we ran into

Working with APIs can be very frustrating and at many times we ran into rate limiting and similar issues. Most of the these issues were due to an abundance of tests and halted production at many steps. But with time and persistence we created a efficient way to test and dodge rate limits.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were quite surprised with how well we split work up. We had a developer working on the font-end another working on the AI aspect and another working on the Canvas API integration.

What we learned

We all advanced our knowledge with working within a team and making sure our work was properly shared and kept safe with GitHub. We learned how to use the Canvas and Gemini API and how the interaction between APIs should function and be planned for.

What's next for Canvas Plus

If we had a little more time we wanted to add the ability for lecture notes to be used. With this addition students can ask relevant questions about notes and link them to their assignments. Another aspect we wanted was the addition of some Better Canvas features, like, dark mode, better to-do list, etc.