ExamVault (NMSU Study Exchange)

Inspiration

Some professors do not release any good study tools for exam preparation, and even those who do often post lacking resources, so we wanted to create a tool that uses previous exams for direct studying and to help students to see exact questions that have been asked in the pass for a given course and professor.

What it does

Allows users to upload previous exams that they have taken, add a difficult tag, and review other's uploads, creating a community driven application to be used for studying and exam preparation.

How we built it

We wanted to experiment with a javascript framework for our app and CSS + HTML for the front end to have a classic front end web dev experience to start. Then we integrated a SQLite Python server and an api client to allow for persistent data storage.

Challenges we ran into

One of the challenges we ran into was how to make all of our elements be separate objects and not have any of them trigger when they shouldn't. Another issue we had was transforming it over from a front-end only Minimum Viable Product into a scalable full stack framework, as integrated a database was hard when we already had an existing local storage design.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are most proud of creating an application that appears can scale and be a useful tool to other students who want to study before their exams. The front end is very user friendly while presenting the information in an easy to understand and approachable way. The backend database was also something that we are proud of as it moved our app from a proof of concept into the realm of actual deployable software.

What we learned

We learned the basic concepts of front end development, and how to integrate AI coding into our workflow to optimize certain aspects of our process and fix bugs. We also learned how to create a simple and persistent SQLite database and have it be hosted on a simple python server.