inspectGMU

landing page
the bot in action

Inspiration

A chatbot that answered questions on student services at Mason sounded interesting to us.

What it does

It pulls info from Student Services + Mason's Financial Aid Handbook to answer students' questions about financial aid.

How we built it

We built it by converting all the web pages to PDFs, turning them into ChatGPT-like chatbots using a no-code tool called Dropchat, and embedding an iframe of the bot on a Typedream site.

Challenges we ran into

Originally we came up with the idea to build a web app where users could write or upload journal entries which are used to create a digital clone of themself which they could talk to. This ended up being way too ambitious for us. From there, we attempted and failed at different ideas until we arrived at something we thought was cool but also knew we could ship by the deadline.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

3 of our team members had never been to a hackathon before. We're also all non-technical business students, but were able to go from idea to a functional product after the 3 days.

What we learned

Trying your best on an idea that's somewhat interesting or solves a problem is more important than trying to have "the best" idea by doing something insanely aspirational. Time also isn't the only constraint at a hackathon lol.

What's next for inspectGMU

There was too much content on the Student Services page for us to process in three days. We picked financial aid because we thought it would be the most useful topic while also saving us time. But, ideally we could expand to different informational topics for students. Also, if enough people find the project useful maybe GMU can take the idea and integrate something similar on the official site.