Inspiration

Anyone who has ever been a student knows the pain of group projects. There is almost always one person who disappears until the very end, yet somehow walks away with the exact same grade as the people who stayed up all night doing the actual work. It is a frustrating experience that can really hurt team morale. We realized that teachers often have no idea what happens behind the scenes. They usually only see the final presentation. We wanted to bring fairness back to group work by building a platform that could objectively track what each member actually contributed, so that everyone gets the grade they truly deserve.

What it does

Groupr is a project management platform that solves the free rider problem. It provides students with a drag and drop Kanban board to organize their tasks. As students complete tasks, the system automatically tracks their activity. It even connects to external tools like GitHub and Google Drive to quantify code commits and document edits. If a student does offline work, like printing posters or doing library research, they can log it manually and have their teammates confirm it. The backend then calculates a fair contribution score for each member. Teachers get a specialized dashboard where they can monitor team dynamics, resolve disputes, and export grading reports.

How we built it

We decided to build the platform using a modular monolith architecture on the backend and a modern single page application on the frontend. For the frontend, we used React and TypeScript. We focused heavily on the user experience by creating a custom glassmorphism design system using Tailwind CSS, giving the app a clean and premium feel.

The backend is powered by Java and Spring Boot. We chose a modular monolith approach because it gave us a clean separation of domains (like auth, tasks, scoring, and integrations) without the deployment nightmare of microservices. We used PostgreSQL for our database and secured the entire application using stateless JWT authentication with Spring Security. Finally, we deployed the frontend to Vercel and the backend to Railway.

Challenges we ran into

Building a fair scoring engine was incredibly tricky. It was easy enough to track when someone moved a task to "Done", but quantifying that work mathematically was a huge challenge. We had to figure out how to weigh a GitHub commit against editing a Google Doc or against offline research.

Another major hurdle was securely handling external data. We had to implement OAuth flows to pull in activity from GitHub and Google Drive. Getting the backend to properly parse external webhooks and map them to our internal users took a lot of late nights. We also had to ensure strict privacy by requiring explicit user consent before tracking any of their data. Additionally, we faced stubborn bugs when wiring the live production backend to the frontend, particularly around strict date formatting rules and managing role based data fetching without crashing the app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are incredibly proud of the user interface. We spent a lot of time perfecting the "Meadow glass ledger" design system, and the result is an app that looks and feels very professional. We are also proud of the offline log and dispute systems. We realized early on that an algorithm cannot capture everything, so we built human fallback mechanisms. Allowing students to log offline work and open disputes if they feel unfairly graded makes the entire platform much more practical for real world classrooms.

What we learned

We learned a massive amount about full stack integration. Sticking to a modular monolith taught us how to strictly enforce boundaries between our services in Java without over complicating our deployment pipeline. On the frontend, we learned how to build highly resilient data contexts. When fetching data for different user roles, we realized how easily a single failed endpoint could break the entire app. We learned to use Promise handlers carefully to ensure that one failing request does not ruin the experience for the entire page.

What's next for Groupr

We want to expand the integrations to include more tools that students use every day, such as Figma for design students or Jira for software engineering classes. We also plan to refine the scoring algorithm by adding peer review surveys at the end of every project milestone. Ultimately, we hope to pilot Groupr in actual university courses to gather real user feedback and see how it impacts team dynamics in a live academic setting.