GitMentor

Dashboard where you can track your progress and badges
Git Visualizer that builds a visual tool that maps commits, branches, and merges in real-time.
Collaboration Playground: A mini-environment where students practice solving merge conflicts safely.

Inspiration

As computer science students, we noticed a sharp disconnect between academic coding and industry software engineering. Classroom assignments involve writing isolated code in a single file, but professional development relies heavily on Git and team workflows. For beginners, Git operates like an intimidating black box where a single wrong command feels catastrophic. We built GitMentor as a safe training simulator to demystifying version control, turn collaboration into a game, and provide real-time guidance.

What it does

GitMentor is a gamified software engineering flight simulator. It pairs an interactive, real-time Git visualizer with an AI-driven pedagogical reviewer to safely teach students professional collaboration workflows.

How we bWe engineered the platform using a React and Vite frontend stack to ensure a fast, highly responsive user experience.

AI Integration: We connected the application to the Gemini API using the gemini-2.0-flash model.

Structured Data: We utilized native structured JSON configuration to force the AI to return rigorous data schemas containing scores, issues, and learning rewards.uilt it

Challenges we ran into

Directory Errors: Our nested folder structure threw terminal errors until we learned to traverse directories properly to find our active scripts.

Live Share Networking: Working across a collaborative Visual Studio Live Share session caused browser connection failures until we actively configured port forwarding to share port 5176.

Data Parsing Crashes: Forcing JSON output via standard text prompts caused formatting deviations and markdown backticks that crashed the application. We resolved this by migrating to native API structure constraints.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

This experience taught us how to scale down features aggressively to meet tight hackathon deadlines. We moved past development isolation to master collaborative engineering environments, learned to isolate sensitive credentials using local environment files (.env), and discovered that the best way to understand a complex system is to build a interactive simulator for it.