NeuralNote

Inspiration

Just like so many projects before ours, the inspiration came from a problem. The 3 members of our team are all in the latter half of our undergraduate careers, pursuing workload-heavy degrees. Similar to our predecessors, we’ve been forced to slog through countless hours of tedious note-taking, review, and organization. The culmination of all this effort resulted in the idea of NeuralNote, an app designed by college students for anyone looking to learn.

What it does

Inspired by the nonlinear learning processes of both artificial intelligence and human biology, NeuralNote leverages a web-based architecture allowing users to organize information in whatever way is most natural to them. Through the utilization of linking technology, users are able to take notes and physically draw connections between different ideas, deepening memory and understanding. Studies have shown that mind maps and graphic organizers have statistically significant increases on memory retention and learning outcomes, meaning NeuralNote actually works! All of this is tied together neatly by the native AI agent Neuri, who helps create flashcards, study guides, practice exams, and more. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11756665/

How we built it

In the true spirit of the hackathon, we dreamt with AI. The model we used the most was easily Gemini, but we also didn’t want to limit ourselves, so we experimented with Claude, ChatGPT, and a few more frontier models. Our selection of features was inspired by a whole host of different apps and strategies that we’ve personally used throughout our academic careers to create the perfect combination of ease of use and efficient, effective features

Challenges we ran into

Coding with AI presents some unique challenges, and we ran into almost all of them. Everything from AI hallucinations to code laden with bugged features plagued us during this project. Outside of coding challenges, we struggled to refine our vision into a concise, tangible roadmap for our app that we could effectively prompt AI to help us build.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As this was everyone on our team's first hackathon, we’re very proud to be presenting a working product, even if it's still in its early stages. We overcame some new challenges that we had never faced before, and we worked collaboratively to refine features and think of new ones that we would have missed solo. We’re particularly proud of the simple and easy-to-use UI as well as the linking between nodes, as it worked better than we could’ve imagined.

What we learned

One of the core takeaways we had from this experience was that leveraging AI is much easier than it seems. With some specific language and a clear idea, we were able to create a relatively complicated program with limited experience in software development.

What's next for NeuralNote

The three of us have fallen in love with this project (and gemma), and we believe that this project has a life outside of this hackathon. During conversations with panel members and guest speakers at today's workshops, we were encouraged to look into startup accelerators and outside investment. With continued effort and dedication, we believe we can turn NeuralNote into a viable business in the education space and help teach the next generation.