NaviGree

Inspiration

Choosing the appropriate courses for college can be a daunting task. Students frequently struggle to successfully plan their four-year journey, from handling prerequisites to balancing workloads and keeping on pace to graduate on time. The need to expedite and simplify the course selection process gave rise to NaviGree, an intuitive application that lets students plot their academic trajectory.

What it does

With the aid of NaviGree, students may create a customized four-year degree plan that takes into account their chosen major and university. The trained AI Agent gives a logical and well-structured course sequence that takes into consideration prerequisite relationships, electives, and core requirements by entering the name of the university and degree program. This guarantees that students can see their whole academic journey clearly and choose their classes wisely each semester.

How we built it

Backend:
- AI Agent: Google Services Vertex AI
Frontend:
- Students can input their degree and university to receive a visual overview of their four-year plan by using ReactJS for the user interface.
Data:
- University websites provided course catalogs, which were then merged into the backend.
Styling:
- The user interface is styled using CSS to make it responsive, easy to use, and aesthetically pleasing for students to interact with.

Challenges we ran into

Connecting the AI Agent with the Frontend:
- The biggest challenge we faced was successfully integrating the AI agent with the frontend to ensure smooth communication between the two. Ensuring the AI-generated course plans were correctly displayed in the user interface and making the interaction between Node.js and the AI Agent seamless took considerable effort.
Chat Box UI in ReactJS:
- We struggled to design and implement the user interface for the chat box, ensuring it was both functional and visually appealing. Managing the interaction between the user input, AI responses, and ensuring the UI responded dynamically was a technical hurdle.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Successfully creating the AI agent and training it.
Developing a clean and responsive front-end that allows users to easily interact with the tool.
Implementing a functional chat box interface in ReactJS.

What we learned

AI and Frontend Integration:
- We learned how to overcome challenges in integrating AI agents with the frontend, managing asynchronous communication between React and AI, and ensuring data flows seamlessly between the two.
UI/UX for Chat Systems:
- Designing and implementing a functional chat box in ReactJS deepened our understanding of managing dynamic interactions between user inputs and AI responses, ensuring a smooth user experience.

What's next for NaviGree

Increase University Support:
- By continuing to compile course catalog information from new institutions, we want to increase support for more universities.
Automatic Data Scraping:
- Using a web scraping technology to automatically gather and update course information from university websites.
Course Plans that are Customizable:
- Enabling users to enter the courses they have finished and have their four-year plan automatically modified to account for their advancement.
Mobile App:
- NaviGree is being developed as a mobile app so that students can access their course plans while they are on the road.