Inspiration

Student life at UBC has a major problem: announcements, tasks, course deadlines, and more are fragmented across many unconnected platforms. Sometimes, students aren't even aware that there's a particular platform they're supposed to check. As a result, students experience unnecessary stress and forgotten assignments/deadlines in the process of organizing their assignments across multiple learning platforms.

What it does

Lauds connects all your learning platforms to one easily searchable dashboard so you can immediately see what you need to get done and how to do it, what you need to know, and what important things are coming up soon.

How we built it

We use Playwright to interact with all the sites students use and gather assignment, reading, and announcement data, then we transform the data into our standardized schema and store it, then surface it to the user.

Challenges we ran into

Adapter construction is hard. Every single website presents data in different ways, and we needed to ensure we could scrape data in the format we need from every platform we needed to access.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were really proud that we managed to connect to a large number of platforms at the end of the day, and were able to implement logic that identified duplicate courses and deduplicated them. We also trained our own classifier model to determine task urgency, but ultimately decided against using it in this due to large size.

What we learned

We gained significant experience in working in a high-velocity work environment, learned about the value of Git and having project management, and developed our ability to coordinate and plan across a team that works both synchronously and asynchronously.