Crunch

Upload your syllabi and get one heatmap of your whole semester.
Every week of the semester, rated from free to overwhelming, so you can see crunch weeks coming.
Click any day to see what’s due and why it’s so busy.
All your syllabi in one place, from PDFs, pasted text or Canvas.
See which friends are free and find the best days to meet.
Plan a study session and chat with your group in one place.

Inspiration

We’ve all had weeks when multiple exams and projects pile up at once. Even when every deadline is on our calendar, it’s hard to see how much work is coming until we’re already overwhelmed. Inspired by the theme “Let’s dig in,” we built Crunch to dig past due dates and help students understand the workload behind them.

What it does

Crunch turns deadlines from syllabi and Canvas into a personalized workload forecast. It estimates how long assignments will take based on their type and grade weight, then distributes that work across the days before each deadline while accounting for classes and study habits.

A heatmap shows which days and weeks are free, busy, heavy, or overwhelming, helping students prepare before their crunch weeks arrive. Students can also compare availability with friends to plan study sessions or find time to take a break together.

How we built it

We built the forecasting engine in TypeScript around four steps: gather, window, spread, and rate.

First, it collects deadlines and estimated work hours, flagging incomplete information for review. Next, it determines a preparation window for each assignment and spreads the estimated hours according to the student’s work habits and available time. Finally, it rates the workload to generate the heatmap.

We separated the forecasting logic from the interface so the same inputs produce a consistent forecast.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge was translating a deadline into a realistic estimate of effort. A short quiz and a major exam might fall on the same day, but they require very different amounts of preparation.

Overlapping deadlines also made scheduling difficult. Spreading work for one assignment affects the time available for everything else. We had to consider those interactions while making the forecast reflect different study habits.

Another challenge was defining what “busy” means. The same workload can feel very different depending on a student’s schedule, so the ratings needed to account for individual availability.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of turning a list of deadlines into a forecast that helps students see when the work will actually happen. The heatmap makes a complicated semester easier to understand at a glance.

We’re also proud of connecting academic planning with students’ social lives. Comparing availability makes Crunch useful for both getting work done and finding time to spend with friends.

What we learned.

We learned that a useful workload forecast needs more than accurate due dates. It also needs to consider assignment effort, available time, and individual habits.

We also learned how important it is to make complex scheduling logic easy to understand. The forecast is most useful when students can quickly see what’s coming and decide how to prepare.

What's next for Crunch

We want to add a short questionnaire to better personalize forecasts from the start. We also plan to let students log the time they actually spend on assignments, helping us improve future estimates.

Our next major step is a mobile app, making Crunch easier to check throughout the day and enabling timely notifications about upcoming workload peaks.