Orion

Inspiration

We are rather competitive people and found that at the end of the year, not only was it boring to study for AP exams, we found it difficult to find proper practice questions for various courses. We wanted to create a product that would allow us to use AI to generate AP-style practice questions for any AP class, and would allow us to have a bit of fun while studying.

What it does

Orion is a competitive real-time question answering game made by students to help with studying for AP courses. It leverages genAI to create practice questions and provide personal guidance. Users can go head-to-head in a game of speed and knowledge in a wide variety of AP subjects.

How we built it

We used the OpenAI API to implement AI-generated AP questions for any subject of our choosing. Using prompt engineering, we were able to create accurate questions for each subject, along with user-specific explanations for everything they got wrong. The website was built with Angular.js and the Firebase infrastructure.

Challenges we ran into

One of the first big issues we ran into was that simply pulling the OpenAI API and asking it to generate questions wasn't very accurate, as often times an incorrect answer was marked correct. We quickly learned that AIs, being language models, struggled at correctly doing numerical computations. We had to make many adjustments, balancing our model cost with performance, as well as improving prompting, to significantly boost model accuracy.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are rather proud of our clean UI and smooth transitions, especially the hyperspace star transition that could have been adapted to any screen transition in the website. Additionally, we were able to get head-to-head multiplayer connections that allowed for real-time competition. And most importantly, we were able to create a project that was fun and engaging, in a way that satisfies the goal we started out with.

What we learned

We learned a lot about team synergy, and how to split up work where everyone is contributing in unique ways. We made use of agile development to create a clean and organized workflow. We learned many hard skills, from Angular.js, TypeScript, prompt engineering, and Firebase infrastructure.

What's next for Orion

We plan to expand to include more academic subjects such as SAT prep as well as implementing skill-based matchmaking automatically so that random people can always play without needing a friend. We also would like to allow users to have their own profiles that would foster community development.

Built With

• angular.js
• cloudflare
• express.js
• firebase
• firestore
• google-cloud
• javascript
• openai
• serverless-functions
• tailwind
• typescript
• zero-hours-of-sleep