Course Outline Planner

Turn your course outline into an organized semester plan. One upload generates all class times, tutorials, and exams directly in your Google Calendar.

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What it does

Every semester, students receive long PDF course outlines full of dates, class times, tutorials, and exams but all of this information has to be manually copied into Google Calendar. It’s slow, repetitive, and easy to get wrong.

Course Outline Planner solves that by letting students upload their syllabus and instantly generate a complete, structured Google Calendar schedule.

Inspiration

We were tired of spending time entering course schedules manually at the start of each semester. If AI can read the PDF, it should be able to build the schedule too , so we built it.

How we built it

  • OpenAI GPT-5.1 to extract structured events from PDFs

  • FastAPI backend to process uploads, parse events, and manage OAuth

  • Google OAuth + Calendar API for syncing real events

  • React + TypeScript frontend with a clean UI and dynamic embedded calendar

  • Automatic recurrent-event generation for weekly classes

Challenges we ran into

  • Parsing inconsistent PDF formats across different universities

  • Handling Google OAuth securely with refresh tokens

  • Making the Google Calendar iframe update instantly after changes

  • Expanding class events into weekly recurring sessions without duplication

    Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

  • Designing strict AI prompts for reliable structured JSON extraction

  • Implementing OAuth flows and managing tokens

  • Syncing external calendars in real time

  • Coordinating frontend iframe refresh, state management, and calendar updates

What's next for Course Outline Planner

  • Multi-course batch uploads

  • Conflict detection for overlapping classes

  • Study reminders and smart scheduling

  • Support for Outlook & Apple Calendar

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