Course Champ

Our Frontend Interface

Inspiration

What's th Our project's idea is a result of a demand to create a calendar for our studies. A big factor in our success as college students is time management, and since undergraduates are very busy, we built a user-friendly calendar generation app that uses AI to generate these calendars.

What it does

The website prompts users to upload a PDF syllabus file. After a short wait, this file is processed and its contents turned into a .ics file, which can be imported into any calendar app.

How we built it

We used HTML, CSS and JS for the frontend, with Python back-end using FastAPI (hosted on Railway), iCalendar, and a Gemini API key to connect and prompt the AI.

Challenges we ran into

The toughest challenge we ran into yet is using AI. Initially, we weren't able to import the AI keys correctly, and so the AI couldn't run. This caused some delays in the project, but after figuring out how to configure the API keys, we were able to run it very quickly. The next hurdle came with formatting the AI output. Since we were relying on text for this, we engineered a prompt for the AI to output the correct formatting so it can be converted into an .ics file. This took us until 11:37PM and a total exhaustion of our Gemini API requests, but at the very last request, it worked.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're most proud of integrating AI into a backend (despite neither of us knowing how to beforehand), and being able to set up a FastAPI backend even though we were totally new to the technology.

What we learned

Throughout the development process, we had fun, and we learnt a lot. The biggest lesson we learnt in this Hackathon was that we needed to have a better plan. Since we didn't plan extensively for this Hackathon, we were at a disadvantage when it came to time. We took our time with the first day, but we had to rush for our second day. This is definitely something we do not want to see happen again when we join our next Hackathon.

What's next for Course Champ

Course Champ will likely go on to have more features. This includes an calendar, so the user can just upload their files and get a web calendar available straight away. We also plan on integrating live chat with an artificial intelligence agent for live course planning, a notification system to remind users of deadlines, as well as a fun competition system, where users compete for hours of study.