Inspiration
Nudge was started on March 18th by hyperactive students, collectively known as Team XCeptions (Pranav Ramesh, Raj Mamidala, and Srihari Raman). With the pandemic changing all of our work to the digital world, we were inspired to create a lightweight and user-friendly Chrome extension to help students like us focus!
How it Works
How does it work? A student can turn on a “study session” through the Chrome extension—during this time, the student’s searches will be locally monitored to prevent distractions. The AI will initially peruse through the online assignment that’s currently being worked on and store keywords related to the assignment (i.e. an essay on domestic policy can store keywords like President Biden, domestic policy, legislation, etc.). With this, as the student opens new tabs or links, the webpage will be scanned to make sure that the content is related to the assignment being worked on. If it isn’t related, Nudge will offer a gentle reminder to the student that he or she still has an assignment to finish—however, the student can always override it if needed! Once the study session is turned off, Nudge goes back to sleep!
How we built it
The extension implements OCR (Optical character recognition) and AI-powered keyword generation capabilities to help students stay on task.
Challenges we ran into
A challenge that we ran into was implementing the AI so the application can give the content to it and the response will be valid to get the keywords of the content. Getting the keywords of the content being presented can make sure that you aren't distracted. Another challenge that we encountered was to implement the JavaScript with the chrome extension as interacting with the chrome extension didn’t work for a part of the application.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- As we were integrating OpenAI's keyword recognition capabilities, we decided to test how the AI responds to different prompts we tested. Through basic QC and QA testing, we were amazed to see how the AI responded to our prompts. It was our first breakthrough into our program!
What we learned
We learned a lot about OpenAI through the coding phase—who knew we were going to integrate it while learning it? Not only did we learn about their integration capabilities but also about their implementation and a very low-level sense of how it may work! Pranav mentioned how he became more interested in learning about AI through working with OpenAI's API client!
Raj learned quite a bit about Tailwind CSS through this process. It was his first time working with the framework, so he learned a lot about how to work with the framework as well as some of the Chart.js capabilities within the Tailwind CSS framework!
Srihari worked a lot with Canva to create the presentation and other logistics as well! He also focused on learning how GitHub and Git work throughout this process (something which he'd been wanting to learn for quite some time). Srihari also began familiarizing himself with the IT setting—he focused on how IT team management works as well as the software development process!
What's next for Nudge
As of right now, we are trying to see if we can integrate Nudge into a mobile application. We hope to take this experience and product from this Hackathon and continue moving forward with it, allowing more and more students around to become more integrated with the software.
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