Lumina: Rethinking Student Engagement in Education

Inspiration

Looking at the problems today which affect education worldwide, it's clear there are many students willing to learn but far fewer teachers, who are nonetheless passionate about teaching, leading to a disconnect between teacher and student. We identified two of the largest factors that contribute to this problem:

Across any class in America, whether it's an elementary school classroom in Georgia or CS50 at Harvard, there are always students with questions who decide not to ask for a variety of reasons. Whether it's because English isn't their first language, they deal with a speech impediment, or they live with a learning disability, the result is that students don't feel comfortable speaking up and end up losing out on valuable knowledge.
In underserved communities with fewer resources, fewer teachers are assigned to far more students than reasonable, causing students to feel unseen and unheard. At the same time, US colleges continue to see record increases in freshman class sizes leading to an identical problem across levels of the education system.

Our inspiration for Lumina stemmed from the potential to harness AI to address these questions, enhancing student understanding and supporting passionate educators in high-demand environments.

What it Does

Lumina integrates seamlessly with lecture notes, allowing students to highlight regions of the notes they find confusing and receive instant solutions from a prompt-engineered chatbot. These highlights are aggregated into a heatmap, so educators can identify the most difficult areas where our chatbot's answers aren't sufficient.

AI Educator: Allows students to highlight regions of the notes they find confusing and receive instant solutions from a prompt-engineered chatbot.
Highlight History: Maintains a log of what regions were highlighted by the student so commonly referenced areas (e.g., formulas) can be accessed instantly.
Heatmap: Developed to give educators insight into where students are truly confused. Student contributions to the heatmap are anonymous, giving a true representation of the most confusing regions of the notes.
Bulbs: Bulbs are markers on the lecture notes educators can create, to respond to high-intensity areas on the heatmap, avoiding more confusion.

Together, these features work to increase student engagement and maximize an educator's effort.

How We Built It

To develop Lumina, we used several advanced technologies:

Next.js and React for building a responsive and interactive user interface.
PDF.js for rendering and interacting with PDF documents, allowing students to highlight and annotate directly on lecture notes.
OpenAI's GPT-4o for generating instant answers to student queries, providing a robust AI-driven educational assistant.
Tailwind CSS for styling, ensuring a modern and accessible design.

Challenges We Ran Into

Smooth PDF Rendering: Implementing smooth, efficient PDF rendering with multiple interactive layers presented technical challenges, especially when managing state across multiple pages to ensure consistent performance.
Real-Time Heatmap Updates: One of our primary challenges was designing an intuitive heatmap system that accurately reflects patterns of student confusion in real-time. This required managing rapid, dynamic updates in classroom environments.
AI Answer Accuracy: Balancing the accuracy of AI-generated responses with the need for human oversight in handling complex or nuanced questions was a careful tuning process. Ensuring that real-time responses were also meaningful and contextually appropriate added to this challenge.
Iterability: We needed a software stack capable of high-level development to implement features quickly without sacrificing on the vision we had for the app.

What's Next for Lumina

Expanded Educational Use Cases: Extend Lumina's capabilities to support a broader range of educational levels.
Enhanced AI Models: Analyzing and refining AI models to improve the accuracy and relevance of instant answers.
Broader Community Integration: Explore partnerships with educational institutions to integrate Lumina into existing learning management systems, enhancing accessibility and impact.

By addressing these challenges, Lumina aims to transform the educational landscape, bringing teachers and students closer together.