MENTORA

Navigate. Achieve. Excel.

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Inspiration

Managing student projects efficiently is a common challenge in academic environments, often leading to missed deadlines, miscommunication, and uneven progress tracking. These inefficiencies not only impact project outcomes but also reduce learning effectiveness and increase stress for students. We were inspired to design MENTORA – an Intelligent Student Project Workflow Assistant that can proactively support students and supervisors by automating project management and providing personalized guidance.

What it does

MENTORA is an AI-powered agent that:

  • Integrates project schedules and monitors task completion for individuals and teams.
  • Tracks document submissions and automatically verifies deadlines.
  • Collects and incorporates supervisor and peer feedback.
  • Sends automated notifications and reminders about upcoming tasks and delays.
  • Flags overdue activities and suggests optimized time management strategies.
  • Provides an interactive chatbot/dashboard for real-time status updates and queries.

By consolidating timelines, task progress, documents, and feedback into one cohesive workflow, it enhances accountability, improves time management, and fosters better communication within academic project teams.

How we built it

We built MENTORA using:

  • IBM’s Agent Development Kit (ADK) to design automation workflows.
  • Granite AI models for natural language understanding and intelligent response generation.
  • Inputs such as timeline data, task updates, document metadata, and feedback forms.
  • A combination of rule-based triggers and machine learning analysis to detect delays and provide personalized recommendations.
  • Planned integrations with tools like Google Drive and common messaging apps to ensure seamless student-supervisor interaction.

Challenges we ran into

  • Consolidating diverse project workflows into a unified system adaptable to varied institutions.
  • Designing a balance between automation and personalization, ensuring that reminders and alerts are useful without being overwhelming.
  • Integrating feedback mechanisms in a way that maintains clarity and reduces manual overhead.
  • Building a system scalable enough to handle group projects, schedule changes, and multilingual needs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Designing an end-to-end agentic workflow that automates repetitive project management tasks.
  • Creating a solution that directly addresses real-world academic challenges faced in Indian universities and colleges.
  • Ensuring multilingual and adaptable design to suit the diversity of Indian campuses.
  • Developing a collaborative workflow where technical and design aspects are seamlessly integrated by a two-member team.

What we learned

  • How to leverage IBM’s ADK and Granite AI models to build intelligent, proactive agents.
  • The importance of user-centric design in ensuring adoption and effectiveness in academic settings.
  • How automation combined with AI can significantly improve productivity and reduce stress in project workflows.
  • The challenges of integrating academic workflows with real-time communication and collaboration platforms.

What's next for MENTORA

  • Expanding integrations with widely used tools (Microsoft Teams, Slack, Trello, etc.) for enhanced collaboration.
  • Adding advanced analytics dashboards for supervisors to track team performance and individual contributions.
  • Enhancing personalization through adaptive learning models that refine recommendations over time.
  • Deploying pilot versions in universities across India to collect real-world feedback and improve usability.
  • Scaling MENTORA into a universal academic workflow assistant that can extend beyond projects to internships, research, and coursework management.

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