OfCourse

Inspiration

Our inspiration for OfCourse primarily came from the frustration of having to navigate the scattered network of barely relevant or intimidating information regarding university courses, resources, and advice. If you've ever had to go dive through 14 year old outdated reddit posts, suffer through unhelpful and unpersonalized advice from overwhelmed academic advisors, or even just felt lost and generally overwhelmed by vast amounts of varying conflicting information, our project was built entirely with you in mind. We wanted to create something that made finding useful, current, and student-relevant information feel less like a scavenger hunt. Instead of forcing students to search through countless disconnected sources, we asked ourselves: What if all of that information lived in one place, a hub, even accessible only by verified students? And what if students themselves could contribute to it? What if that was the core feature?

This type of questioning, brainstorming, and ideating became the foundation for OfCourse.

What it does

OfCourse was designed with the primary purpose of bridging that seemingly insurmountable gap between students and genuinely helpful/relevant information. How? Yeah, that wasn't a simple question to answer.

We started by breaking down the biggest problems students face when trying to make decisions about their courses: outdated information, a lack of context, conflicting opinions, and advice that isn't personalized to the individual student.

Thus, we decided that a student based hub could bring these pieces together. Each university was it's own separate community and each course can serve as its own sub community, where students can share experiences, advice, resources, and discussions with others who have taken or are currently taking: the same class.

OfCourse functions not just by combining the familiarity of a community forum with student-specific academic information but also by creating a space where students can not only find information, they can also contribute to the information future students will rely on. A "maintenanced"/relevant cycle of assistance.

Thus, we decided that a student-based hub that

How we built it

We built OfCourse as a web application with a focus on creating a simple and approachable experience for students. Our development process involved dividing the project into its core components—including the course community system, student profiles, discussions, and how we could fit AI into personalizing each individual experience within such core components. As a team, we used a combination of our existing programming knowledge and AI-assisted development tools to accelerate implementation, troubleshoot problems, and explore technologies that were relatively unfamiliar to us. Rather than treating AI as a replacement for our own development, we used it as a tool to help us turn our ideas into a functional prototype within the limited timeframe of the hackathon.

Challenges we ran into

The most significant (and obvious) challenge we ran into was simply our lack of experience in developing a web application and the integration of artificial intelligence models. Obviously, as a team made up of CS and Comp E. majors, we love opportunities to learn and grow our programming skills and knowledge, that's something that never wavered throughout this experience. But we were wise enough to realize that without the use of AI tools to help with certain technical implementation (both front and back end), we would not be able to deliver a working demo that captured our ideas within the timeframe we were given.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are especially proud of the design processes and methologies we followed as a group consisently throughout the hackathon that centered around "Would this be useful to a story and does this tie back to the premise?" This constant questioning resulted in the avoidance of adding features simply because they were technically interesting as again, we continuously tried to connect our decisions back to the problem we originally wanted to solve. We're especially proud that we were able to take an idea that initially existed mostly as a collection of problems and turn it into a functional prototype within such a short period of time.

What we learned

Our challenges that we faced during this project such as learning how to effectively work with these tools quickly became opportunities to learn as we had to understand the generated code, debug unexpected behavior, connect different parts of the application, and make design decisions ourselves. We somewhat knew and understood that building a product/idea is much more than just simply writing code and the time that we spent constantly questioning the utility of various different features made it seem like we never learned it at all before this weekend. We learned the importance of breaking down a problem and clearly defining it before even attempting to solve it as seemingly quick and simple features can evolve into complications during implementation. As our first hackathon and our first time using AI tools to build a project of this scale, we also gained experience using said tools as a development tool. Most importantly and contrast to our original beliefs, we learned that a hackathon isn't about building the most technically sophisticated product. It's about taking an idea, challenging your assumptions and limitations, working within constraints, and seeing how far you can take it.

What's next for OfCourse

What's next for OfCourse? The overarching consensus among the OfCourse team is to challenge ourselves to learn even more than we did during this hackathon. For sure when it comes to incorporating artificial intelligence into a project in meaningful ways. We truly believe that OfCourse's mission is something that can become bigger than its initial conception and recognize that the idea that started as the "end-all" for simple frustrations with finding information about courses can ultimately become a platform that helps students make better-informed academic decisions throughout their entire university experience.