Project Pulse

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  Homepage

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  Accountabilty page

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  share assets page

Inspiration

When we first looked at the "Life on Campus" experience, we were hit with a problem every student knows too well: the "free-rider" nightmare. We’ve all been in those group chats where tasks get lost in a sea of messages and one person ends up doing all the work at 2 AM. We decided to put our heads together to bridge this "Accountability Gap." We wanted to move away from chaotic apps and create something that actually makes group work fair and transparent.

What it does

Our app, Project Pulse, is a dedicated dashboard that keeps group projects on track without the stress. It’s built to give every student a voice and a clear role. The Accountability Clock lets users log their actual contribution time so no one gets left behind, while our Micro-Task Boards break down big scary projects into tiny, manageable steps. We also included a Shared Asset Bucket—a one-stop shop for all files so nobody has to ask "where is the latest draft?" ever again.

How we built it

We used the Base44 platform to jumpstart our development, which allowed us to generate the core structure and iterate quickly. For the front end, we used Next.js and Tailwind CSS to create a clean, minimalist UI that wouldn't overwhelm stressed-out students. On the backend, we utilized a FastAPI/Node.js architecture to handle the logic, with MongoDB/PostgreSQL for the database and AWS S3 to manage the file storage for our Asset Bucket.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest hurdle was actually "feature creep." It was so tempting to keep adding complex professional tools, but we had to constantly remind ourselves: "This is for students, not CEOs." We spent hours stripping things back to keep it simple. Integrating the Accountability Clock was also a challenge; we had to figure out how to make it a helpful tool for proof of work rather than something that felt like "Big Brother" watching the team. Accomplishments that we're proud of We’re really proud of how we distilled a massive problem like "project chaos" into three simple, working features. Successfully using the Base44 generation process to go from an idea to a working prototype in such a short time was a huge win for us. We’re also super happy with the Accountability Clock—it’s a simple solution to the universally hated "free-rider" problem that actually works!

What we learned

We learned that in a high-pressure environment like finals week, "less is more." A minimalist design that does one thing perfectly (accountability) is way more valuable than a complex app with a hundred buttons. We also learned how to leverage AI-assisted generation tools to speed up our workflow without losing the "human touch" in the final UI/UX.

What's next for Project Pulse

We plan to build an "Instructor View" so professors can see the real-time analytics of who is contributing what. We also want to implement an LLM feature that can listen to a meeting and automatically turn those notes into Micro-Tasks on the board. Finally, we’re looking into direct integration with Canvas and Blackboard to make Project Pulse a standard part of the university experience.

Built With Base44 Next.js Tailwind CSS FastAPI / Node.js MongoDB / PostgreSQL

Try it out Project Pulse Live Demo https://project-pulse-050a2a3f.base44.app

Built With

• base