Proof Buster

Submitting a proof for feedback
Adjusting conjecture tags
Flowchart
Description of interface

Inspiration

As you may or may know as students or professionals in STEM, the jump in math education to primarily problem solving based learning to proof writing is a difficult switch for many students and professors alike. Based on our experiences taking and grading proof-focused courses at our universities and the lack of targeted practice available for learning this essential mathematical skill, we created Proof Buster.

Description

Proof Buster is an educational tool which provides students with an assisted gamified approach to proof writing inspired by similar platforms for programming and language learning. Through Proof Buster, students select a conjecture to prove and learn by doing. Unlike traditional tutors and teaching assistants who must carefully read through long paragraphs to identify errors, our AI tutoring agent which leverages Gemini’s speed at identifying common errors to provide accurate and immediate feedback to the user. Through Gemini’s ability to add additional model tuning and directly call functions within our project, we are able to leverage AI’s data processing strength to both save hours of labor for instructional teams and provide a much more intuitive and engaging learning experience for students.

Development

Proof Buster uses a standard frontend and a node.js based server for its backend. The backend utilizes Google's Gemini API to train the model on conjectures and ready-made proofs to fine tune it to our project needs and avoid errors with its assessment of students' proofs as well as Gemini's function calling to get non-String values for use throughout our project. Despite some unfamiliarity with JavaScript and a team size of just 2, we were able to create a fully functional website that accomplished all the basic features which we sought out to perform.

Looking Forward

Proof Buster is not just a throwaway project; it was specifically designed to help us with proof-based math courses and their education. With small tweaks and additions such as a web-based server, user login, conjecture submission, and regularly added conjectures, we believe Proof Buster will be instrumental in helping teach students in classes we grade or take ourselves.

Built With

Submitted to

Cal Hacks 11.0

Created by

I worked full-stack on the project, learning on the fly the Gemini API and Node.js, both of which I had never used before. I trained the Gemini model and created the functions which interface with it as well as formatting its responses. I also was in charge of finding conjectures and proofs to supply to both the user and the Gemini model. I also helped with some frontend design choices, including the logo.

Jayden Entenmann
I worked full stack. For the back-end, I worked on the text-input function (data that is sent to the AI model when queried), filter function (sorting custom objects from a json file), and randomize functions (selecting a random question from a loaded cache of objects pulled from the server). I integrated communication between the back-end node.js with the front-end. For the front-end, I worked on the general UI, such as the text boxes, buttons, and layout design.

Elias James Wu

Updates

Jayden Entenmann started this project — Oct 20, 2024 01:29 PM EDT

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