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Take care of your pal by giving it files to summarise and play games with!
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Answer Q&As in quick-fire Card Match games!
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Or opt to memorise key words and definitions with a crossword.
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Redeem points earned from games for real-world rewards.
Inspiration and What It Does
After the COVID-19 pandemic, distance learning and lecture recordings have become popular options at schools and universities. However, many students with disabilities, concentration issues or ADHD suffer when faced with a blank screen and no in-class interaction. There are loads of applications that leverage AI to create study resources, but these are often unengaging or geared towards incredibly motivated students.
Enter EduPals - a way to motivate yourself into studying by instantly gamifying class notes, slides or homework into fun, interactive questions that earn you rewards! Every user is given a Pal - their very own companion they need to take care of by feeding it files. When fed files consistently, a Pal's happiness goes up, allowing you to gain more points from games. Games are generated using the content of files, creating a different activity everytime and keeping up user engagement; after a game concludes, a user earns points from it, which can be spent to redeem real-world items, from t-shirts to speakers!
How we built it
EduPals was made with Flask (a Python framework), JavaScript, TailwindCSS, and OpenAI's API with some custom HuggingFace models. Flask powers the entire site, ensuring the user database, Pals and backend behave as best as they can, with JavaScript also working behind the scenes to deliver each game. Tailwind was used for styling, and a Tika server, followed by a custom HuggingFace model condenses each PDF into key points, which are fed into OpenAI to produce definitions and appropriate formatting.
Challenges we ran into
Tuning our models and ensuring OpenAI worked all the time was a difficult task, and Flask often threw unexpected errors when we merged our separate features into one. Juggling Hackathon work with the stresses of real-life was difficult as well, especially when we had to run off for large parts of the weekend!
Accomplishments that we're proud of
This is three teammates' first Hackathon, and they're proud to have contributed to such a large project in such a short space of time. The application is pretty much fully functional, and could be used in the real world at any time, which is something we're all really happy with.
What we learned
Each of us learned a lot more about Flask and JavaScript, and we'd never created games before as individuals, which was a welcome challenge when developing EduPals. Tailwind often didn't play nicely with us, so learning to troubleshoot CSS on the fly was a valuable skill we all gained from this project in particular! We also learned the value of teamwork, having never teamed up as a group before - and we'd be happy to do so again knowing the skills each individual has to bring.
What's next for EduPals
More games, and partnerships with sponsors will allow the fun of EduPals to expand and appeal to an even wider audience.
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