PridePath

Roomie wellness page
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Achivements section
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Inspiration

As students at our university, we watched our peers struggle — not because the material was too hard, but because studying felt isolating, boring, and completely disconnected from how they actually felt. Burnout was everywhere. Mental health was an afterthought. And every study tool we tried treated wellness like it did not exist.

We wanted to build something different. Something that understood that a student who is stressed, exhausted, or anxious cannot learn effectively — no matter how good the content is. Our university's mascot is the lion, and lions don't hunt alone. They move in prides. That's what PridePath is: a study companion that moves with you.

What It Does

PridePath is an AI-powered study and wellness platform where students upload their own course materials — PDFs, lecture slides, and textbooks — and Gemini AI transforms them into interactive, gamified learning experiences.

AI Course Generation Upload any document and Gemini automatically parses it, identifies key concepts, and generates a full checkpoint curriculum with quiz questions, multiple choice options, and detailed explanations — all drawn from your own material.

Three Game Modes

🚀 Speed Mode — Timed, high-energy rounds for exam crunch
🧘 Zen Mode — Calm, no-pressure exploration for deep understanding
📖 Story Mode — Correct answers unlock the next chapter of your subject

Achievements System Students earn real milestone badges tied to actual progress:

Century Scholar — 100 correct answers in one session
Comeback Kid — Return after 30+ days and improve your score
Polymath — Active in 3+ subjects in one week

Roomie — Your Wellness Coach ✨ Powered by Gemini Roomie is a built-in AI wellness coach that lives in PridePath. It monitors how you study, not just what you study. After 3 hours of straight studying, Roomie prompts a breathing break. After a streak of wrong answers, it suggests a reset. Students log their mood before every session and chat with Roomie anytime. Over time, Roomie learns when you focus best and where burnout starts.

Mood Trend Tracking A live graph tracks mood across days with a clear color system:

🔴 Bad (1–2)
🟡 Moderate (3)
🟢 Good (4–5)

How We Built It

We built PridePath in a single Next.js repository with no separate backend. All AI calls happen server-side through Next.js API routes, keeping API keys secure. Supabase handles authentication, file storage, and the relational database — all from one dashboard.

The auth system uses a username-only experience on the frontend while quietly using email-based authentication behind the scenes — a deliberate engineering decision to leverage Supabase's proven auth infrastructure without exposing complexity to the user.

Challenges We Ran Into

Schema Synchronization The biggest technical challenge was keeping our database schema in sync with the code as we built rapidly. We hit multiple missing column errors mid-build and had to patch the schema iteratively using ALTER TABLE migrations while the app was running.

Gemini API Limits The free tier of the Gemini API has strict daily limits. We hit the quota ceiling during testing and had to strategically switch models and optimize our API calls to stay within limits during the hackathon.

File Type Support Gemini Vision natively supports PDFs and images but not PowerPoint or Word files. We had to implement text extraction pipelines for unsupported formats to ensure students could upload any type of course material.

Real-Time Wellness UX Building Roomie's typewriter animation, blinking lion icon, and streaming chat responses while keeping the UI smooth required careful state management with Zustand and precise Framer Motion sequencing.

Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

Built a fully functional AI-powered study platform from scratch in one hackathon
Gemini parses any academic document and generates a complete quiz curriculum automatically with zero manual setup from the student
Roomie is a genuinely useful wellness companion — not a gimmick. It responds to how students study in real time
Designed and shipped three distinct game modes each with unique UX and pacing
Built a secure, production-grade auth system with a clean username-only experience backed by robust email auth under the hood
The mood trend graph gives students a visual history of their mental health across their study journey — something no other study app offers

What We Learned

How to build a full-stack AI application under a tight deadline
How to use Gemini's multimodal capabilities to parse and understand academic documents
The importance of database schema planning before writing application code
How to design for emotional UX — building technology that responds to how users feel, not just what they do
How to manage a team codebase under pressure using Git branching and pull requests

What's Next for PridePath

Mobile app built in React Native so students can study anywhere
Peer study rooms — study live with your pride in real time
Professor upload portal — let instructors seed courses directly for their students
PridePath Score — a composite metric combining academic performance and wellness trends over time
Offline mode for studying without internet access
Integration with university LMS platforms like Canvas and Blackboard

Built with 🦁 at LionHacks by Team PridePath