Essay Eagle

App that enables students to ethically use AI to help write their essays

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Inspiration

Essay Eagle was inspired by conversations between myself and my daughter about AI. We talked about using AI in education and how it can revolutionize education but needs to rid itself of the stigma of being a cheat machine. So we decided, let's stop talking and start creating; Essay Eagle was born. Essay Eagle lets students experience the benefits of AI for essay writing while adhering to ethical and academic integrity standards.

What it does

Essay Eagle is your AI wingman! With Essay Eagle, students can:

  • Submit their essays and receive insightful and deep feedback full of suggestions for improvements
  • Get an AI-powered rewrite, serving as a helpful tutor as they perfect their essays.
  • Ask for an essay outline and get a blueprint for essay success

And there is interactive chatbot functionality, allowing the student to talk to the AI about their essay, feedback, the AI essay or the outline.

The mission of Essay Eagle is to teach students how to harness AI in an ethical manner.

Give it a try and check out the video demo

How we built it

We used AWS PartyRock which is an awesome tool for creating generative AI apps.

Kudos to the PartyRock team for building such an intuitive app that makes multiple inputs and chained LLM inputs and outputs so easy!

Challenges we ran into

AWS PartyRock makes it very easy to create an AI app. The big challenge was getting the prompting right. We spent many hours experimenting with the prompts and their inputs to get the prompts right.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of the output - the outlines, essay rewrites, and feedback are high quality. Our perseverance in getting the prompting right really paid off.

What we learned

Prompting is hard. That is, good and effective prompting is hard. Hard enough that we built our own tool (another contestant entry) Prompt Hero to help with the prompting.

In addition, we used an iterative process that allowed an LLM to create effective prompts.

  • Give a detailed set of requirements to an LLM and ask it to create a prompt
  • Provide any feedback to the LLM on the generated prompt and ask it if it's the best prompt it can create for the task
  • Ask the LLM to look at the newly generated prompt it just created and see if there are any optimizations or changes it would suggest
  • Repeat the above steps a couple of times. Each time the LLM optimizes the prompt.

A note and a caveat: Using different LLMs and asking them to optimize each other's prompt works well. One caveat: during the process, an LLM may "forget" an important part of the prompt. Check the prompt to ensure this doesn't happen and ask to correct if it forgets.

What's next for Essay Eagle

Continuing to add features that allow students to ethically use AI for academic help. We have a ton of ideas. We also look forward to more PartyRock UI tools to make it look and work even better.

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