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From Worksheet to Quiz with Jana
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Three Places Offered, Two Claimed.
Jana is a personal AI tutor for school and adult learners. They can follow lessons or bring their own worksheets and lectures to create study notes, flashcards and quizzes. When a quiz answer surprises them, they can open the passage that explains it and try again.
For the PayPal AI Hackathon, we added a way for workshop organizers to fund a month of online Jana Study for each learner who claims a place.
Inspiration
Imagine running a revision workshop and asking, “I have $36 for three learners. How do I offer help to all three and pay only for the places they claim?” Buying three subscriptions up front can leave places unused. Asking learners to pay first means they need a card and money to spare.
What we built
A sponsor approves up to $36 in PayPal for three invitations. Each learner can claim a $12 month of Jana Study without entering a payment card. They can change their mind until the claim window closes. If two claim, Jana collects $24. If nobody claims, Jana releases the authorization and the sponsor pays $0. The month has no automatic renewal.
In the demo, Nia claims a place, activates her month and opens a quiz based on her chemistry worksheet. She thinks a catalyst increases the equilibrium constant because it makes the reaction faster. Jana takes her back to the sentence explaining that a catalyst speeds both directions. At the same temperature, the equilibrium constant stays the same. Nia revises her answer. The organizer sees how many places were funded. Nia’s answers stay private.
How we built it
We added workshop sponsorship to Jana’s existing Study app. A Python service uses PayPal Orders v2 to request the sponsor’s approval and Payments v2 to capture the amount claimed or void the authorization. SQLite records claims and settlement. Jana checks PayPal’s result before making a paid month available. For online Study, Jana sends the selected worksheet excerpts to Gemini through Google Cloud Vertex AI and checks the answer’s citations against the saved worksheet version.
The hardest part and what we learned
A learner can click twice. PayPal can complete a payment just as the connection drops. We had to make it safe to resume without charging twice or giving away an unfunded month. We learned to give each person one decision. The sponsor sets the spending limit and the learner chooses whether to claim. PayPal’s confirmation determines how many months Jana can issue.
What we verified
In PayPal Sandbox, two test claims produced one final $24 capture against a $36 authorization. In a second workshop, nobody claimed, so Jana voided the authorization and the sponsor paid $0. The video shows those receipts alongside a local rehearsal in the Jana app with a test learner and a simulated payer. The chemistry quiz came from a separate verified Gemini 3.8 Flash run on the same worksheet. Jana checked Nia’s choices and opened the cited passage during the recording.
