WriteUp

Gamified approach for academic writing

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Hello, we are WriteUp!

Ever since I was 7 I have always loved playing video games. However, as I was an international student, I had never taken a English Writing class and was never good at academic writing. I always struggled with writing essays in a second language. One of the biggest reasons why I could not devote my full attention to academic writing was because I felt that it was never fun and engaging. To approach this problem, we’ve built an AI powered gamified writing platform that creates an engaging platform for enhancing your English academic writing. We do this by using AI to provide feedback on the essay's submitted by the user. In addition, our program also has an integrated skill ranking system (like ELO for chess.com), which when a certain level is reached unlocks tier ranks and badges for the user to enjoy and collect. Furthermore, in order to differentiate from other applications in the world, we plan to take the approach of Kaggle or Leetcode of the writing industry, and to host competitions with corporations and sponsors to engage and create external motivation for our users.

In terms of the technical side of our program, we built the frontend of our application using React JS, and we used Flask for the backend, MongoDB for the database. The biggest challenge that we faced in our project was when were trying to interact with the AI and activate our API calls. We also had trouble dynamically representing the feedback given back by our Writing AI assistant.

We also plan to release the program as a Business to Business model, where we would not charge our user's money but rather focus on working with corporations and making learning accessible for all. We aim to do this through utilizing opportunities such as the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) of a corporation, and working with them and promoting them on our website. This would allow these corporations to get the exposure they want in terms of CSR, and they would be paying us a fee for marketing which we would then use for the maintenance and expansion of our program. In the future, we aim to implement daily quests, realtime feedback, and community events.

Through the building of our project, we were able to reflect on our own personal problems and brainstorm how our problems may be faced by more people in the world.

This is our first time any of us have done a Hackathon, and it was a lot of fun! Thank you for hosting us Brown!

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