Course Crafter

🧠 About the Project

🎯 Inspiration

As self-learners, we often struggle with a simple but frustrating question:
"Where do I start, and what should I follow?"
With countless courses, tutorials, and articles scattered online, finding the right path for learning something new is overwhelming.
Course Crafter was born to solve this — an AI tool that designs personalized learning roadmaps in seconds based on your time, budget, and preferences.

🛠 How We Built It

The project was built in a 7–8 hour solo sprint for a hackathon, using:

• 🧠 LLaMA 3 via Modal for large language model inference
• ⚙️ FastAPI to handle backend requests and deploy LLM logic
• 💻 Gradio for building an intuitive and clean frontend UI
• 📄 TXT for generating downloadable course plans

All code was modularized to enable future extensibility, including adding dynamic resource fetching from YouTube, Reddit, and arXiv.

🧩 What I Learned

• How to use Modal's modern deployment flow for serverless AI functions
• Best practices for prompt engineering and formatting output with LLMs
• Integrating Gradio custom components (copy/download buttons, etc.)
• How to streamline user input → AI → actionable output workflow
• Working with formats like .txt to enhance usability

🚧 Challenges Faced

• Fine-tuning prompts to generate outputs that are useful, structured, and link-rich
• Dealing with asynchronous backend calls to Modal APIs
• Implementing custom download functionality in Gradio beyond default outputs
• Managing file persistence in stateless serverless environments

Overall, Course Crafter was a fast-paced yet rewarding build, showing how powerful AI can be when aligned with real-world learning needs.

Built With

• fastapi
• gradio
• llama3
• modal
• python