Inspiration
The Empire Strikes Back is all about people with a common enemy coming together to fight for their lives. Our team thought hard about this theme and wanted to create something that could bring people together in a similar way. Padawan Academy is an application that can do this. All students eventually come across their own "empire" also known as college. This is a breaking point for many students and often they give in and resort to academic misconduct. Padawan Academy will be a tool for all students to help them with their studies while still helping them learn instead of just giving the answers. When the darkness becomes too much, this application will be able to light up a path to move forward.
What it does
Our application's focus is organization specifically for students, something that ChatGPT does not give to its users. When the user enters the application after successful authentication, they enter the "Courses" view, where they can access an editable list of all the classes they have added. Upon clicking on a course, they can see a list of previous inquires they had regarding any of its relevant topics. The user can also click through these questions to view their history in more detail, or for review.
The user can also access ChatGPT from the Questions page to ask one of the wisest species in the universe of Star Wars about their academic inquiries. A de-aged Yoda (not Grogu) awakens when you tap him, and a chat view appears for a personal one-on-one training session. Tapping Yoda again will put him back to meditation mode until you seek out his wise council once more.
How we built it
We utilized Figma to create mockups for our different features. Once we finished the different drafts, we used SwiftUI and MongoDB to create Padawan Academy. It is currently created for iOS only.
Challenges we ran into
One of the biggest obstacles that we ran into was getting pass the large learning curves. Some of us had little to no experience in SwiftUI, so they had to learn from scratch. We also had many plans for different features that will unfortunately not be able to see the light. This stemmed from slightly overestimating ourselves and forgetting that a majority of the team were also first time hackers. Another challenge was trying to get an open source AI integrated into our application. We spent hellish hours researching without sleep and hunching over our laptops letting our fingers tap away while we raced to meet the deadline.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
As a team built up of a majority of first time hackers, we are already proud that we have gotten this far. We were able to integrate ChatGPT into our application through asking a question to Yoda, learn a new language and developing an entire app using it, and somehow staying awake for 24 hours straight to finish creating Padawan Academy without catching a single wink. We were also able to add our own designs and drawings in the app as well. Our excitement only grew as we continued to code and saw how much potential it had to truly help people.
What we learned
We learned that no matter how impossible something seems, with hard work and perseverance anything is possible. The force was indeed with us and we worked meticulously to perfect our work. Within 24 hours, we were able to utilize new features such as MongoDB and Postman and expand on knowledge of familiar languages and programs. One of us even learned how to code using Swift today!
What's next for Padawan Academy
We wanted to take our application above and beyond during this Hacklahoma to not only promote a more structured and true form of education to use AI for learning rather than cheating, but to also allow those with disabilities to access these features as well. We had initially planned to integrate text-to-speech and speech-to-text for the visually impaired. Upon awakening Baby Yoda, we wanted to prompt ChatGPT with a speech-to-text voice recording. After ChatGPT receives the prompt, the application would read off ChatGPT's response to the user.
Additionally, we wanted to have users focus more on the learning rather than hastily getting the answers. We had implemented some backend logic to prompt ChatGPT specifically to return the answer in a step-by-step format, but was not able to integrate with the frontend. We also wanted to put a timer on each step so the user takes their time to understand each step.
Built With
- ai
- amazon-web-services
- chatgpt
- figma
- mongodb
- openaiswift
- postman
- procreate
- swift
- swiftui
- xcode
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