EduMate AI

EduMate AI home screen: your personal AI study buddy with three tools, Ask AI, Notes and Quiz.
Ask AI: type any question and get a simple, student-friendly explanation powered by Google Gemini.
Notes: enter any topic and instantly get a short summary with key points for quick revision.
Notes: enter any topic and instantly get a short summary with key points for quick revision.
Responsive design: EduMate AI works smoothly on phones, tablets and desktops with a clean, simple layout.

Inspiration

Studying alone is hard. When you get stuck on a concept, you either search through long articles or wait for someone to explain it. We wanted a simple tool that works like a patient study buddy: one place to ask a question, get quick revision notes, and test yourself, without signing up for anything or fighting a cluttered interface.

What it does

EduMate AI is a lightweight AI study assistant with three features:

Ask AI: type any question and get a simple, student-friendly explanation.
Notes: enter a topic and get a short summary with key points for quick revision.
Quiz: enter a topic and get 5 multiple-choice questions with 4 options each. Click an answer to see instantly whether you were right, and get a final score.

There is no login and no database. Open it and start learning.

How we built it

Frontend: React + Vite, with plain CSS for a clean, responsive design that works on phones and desktops.
Backend: Node.js + Express with three endpoints: /api/ask, /api/notes and /api/quiz.
AI: Google's Gemini API (gemini-2.5-flash), called only from the backend.
Security: The API key lives in backend/.env and never reaches the browser. The Vite dev server proxies /api requests to the backend, so the frontend only talks to our own server.

Each endpoint sends Gemini a different prompt. Ask AI is told to explain simply, Notes to give a one-line summary plus key points, and Quiz to return structured JSON that the frontend renders as interactive questions.

Challenges we ran into

Getting reliable quiz output. AI text is unpredictable, and a quiz needs a strict structure. We asked Gemini for JSON with an answerIndex for each question, enabled JSON response mode, and added parsing and validation on the backend.
Keeping the API key safe. Calling Gemini directly from React would expose the key, so all AI calls go through the Express server.
Clean, readable output. Raw AI responses are full of markdown symbols, so we prompted for plain text and used white-space: pre-wrap to keep line breaks tidy.
Handling failures gracefully. Missing keys, empty input, network problems and API errors each show a clear message instead of a blank screen.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A full-stack AI app with three working features and a simple, easy-to-read codebase.
An interactive quiz with instant right/wrong feedback and scoring.
A design that stays clean and usable on small screens.