Familiarize

Opening page
User dashboard
Example simulation of osmosis

Inspiration

We were inspired to create Familiarize due to the large amount of learners that often miss out on STEM education because of it's daunting nature. As a result, we wanted to share the impressive nature of the ever-growing field, and what better way to do that than show everybody the way STEM powers their interests.

What it does

Familiarize takes complex concepts and explains it in a way tailored to every individual user. Familiarize takes user inputted anchors that capture their interests, and allows them to generate articles about abstract and advanced STEM topics in the perspective of their favorite hobbies or interests. This recontextualization of advanced concepts allows the user to engage themselves in learning, and gain confidence as they build understanding.

How we built it

We began our project in base44, quickly building a prototype app and utilized other similar platforms such as rocket to help generate the UI for our app. From this point out, we used many tools such as Claude and GPT to further polish our app's UI, and polish and correct any bugs in functioning that we weren't able to correct in base44.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into challenges regarding generation of articles and being able to pull information from the internet. Furthermore, we had initially planned to create Familiarize as a chrome extension alongside being a website, but ultimately found that we were unable to do so within the time constraints. Ultimately we experienced a large amount of challenges in properly generating articles that were tailored to each unique anchor that the user inputted, as the project would often default to our placeholder anchors.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our accomplishments to create a tailored experience to each user that serves to bring more and more people to areas of STEM that pave the way for the future. Our experience also made us proud in that we were able to impart meaningful information to other like-minded learners, while allowing them to approach the challenge of education in a fun and engaging way that will encourage them to learn further.

What we learned

We learned for future hackathons and such to maximize time, as one of our greatest struggles was simply keeping up with what we had planned. The project was technically difficult in the context that it required a tailored experience to each user, and would generate new content for everyone, meaning that we were constantly running into roadblocks which kept eating away at our time all the way until the deadline. But nonetheless, we learnt the best way to utilize AI tools was to utilize multiple at the same time to tackle multiple different tasks at once and later combine them as to maximize whatever time we have.

What's next for Familiarize

Familiarize currently exists as a website and a functional extension. The future of familiarize is immersing new users in learning complicated STEM through their own interests, while expanding the capabilities of our AI bot and creating a more functional extension. The next steps involve a more idealized extension that can open as a window in one's own tab making the extension entirely self-contained rather than rerouting users to the website to encourage ease of use.