Inspiration
We noticed that many students give up the opportunity to learn when they use AI. Instead of being a positive tool, it's hindering students' ability to learn and grow.
What it does
LearninGrounds offers an easy and fun way to spin up the tutor of your choice. Make them funny, formal, chill, or whatever you like. Tutors can draw on and interact with your assignments and come up with questions about your course subjects.
How we built it
After deciding on the idea and the stack, we chose a roadmap for the first MVP. We started by combining ElevenLabs and Gemini to create the tutors. Then we researched tools for the LearninGrounds interactive canvas, pairing a visual whiteboard (tldraw) with text-to-speech AI tools. Next, we worked on connecting their information to Canvas LMS, the main platform colleges and universities use for academic work. Finally, we polished the UI and some other features.
With the app done, I finished integrating Auth0 and deployed it on a VPS with a domain: learningrounds.com.
Challenges we ran into
Canvas LMS has many problems with its API and with connecting to an actual student account. We worked around this by creating a Lite account and adding LearninGrounds as an external app with access to only some of the course info. Unfortunately, it's limited for now.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
For our first hackathon, I'm proud that we built such a cool and polished project as a two-person team. The idea was great, and we were able to build every core feature we planned while making the UI look just as we first envisioned it.
What we learned
Coordinating tasks is hard, and dealing with issues in parallel is even harder. I'll never underestimate the talent and effort hackers put into their projects again. And even though we built a really cool project, I believe we could have achieved more.
What's next for LearninGrounds
Next up is the full Canvas LMS integration, plus quality-of-life features, more tools for the visual canvas, more subjects and tutors, support for more document types, more customization, and making it feel like a polished, production-ready product.
