1. Homepage/ Landing page
2. Explore courses page
3. Course details age
4. AI course advisor
5. My courses page
6. View course details page
7. Saved Courses page

SmartCourse Advisor

Hackathon Theme: Merger – Merging student voices, academic data, and AI insights into one platform.

📌 Inspiration

Choosing the right course at university is often stressful. Students rely on scattered word-of-mouth reviews, outdated course guides, or trial-and-error. With the University of Adelaide merger coming up, there’s an even stronger need to merge student voices, academic data, and AI insights into one clear platform. That’s why we built SmartCourse Advisor, to empower students with smarter, faster, and more reliable course choices.

🚀 What it does

SmartCourse Advisor is a student-friendly course recommendation platform that merges:

⭐ Peer ratings & reviews – Students can rate and review past courses with quick tags like “great lecturer” or “heavy workload.”
🤖 AI-powered course advisor – A chatbot that suggests courses based on academic path, current enrolments, interests, workload balance, and Elective Recommendations.
📘 My Courses Tracker – A place to input current and completed courses, helping the AI avoid overlaps and suggest relevant next steps.
🔎 Course explorer with rich details – Each course has a detailed profile (description, prerequisites, workload, syllabus, ratings).
📂 Saved Plan – Students can build a shortlist of courses to compare side by side before enrolling.

🛠 How we built it

Data & APIs: Reverse-engineered the University of Adelaide’s Course Planner API to seed our course database.
AI Advisor: Built and trained using Pickaxe, with help from a YouTube tutorial on building chatbots.
Frontend: Prototyped on Replit and refined in Figma for a modern, student-friendly look.
Backend: Node.js/Express with an SQL database hosted on Hostinger.
Idea validation & feedback: Used ChatGPT to brainstorm features and refine the student experience.

⚡ Challenges we ran into

Reverse-engineering and cleaning the course data.
Training the AI bot to balance conversational flow with accurate academic logic.
Hackathon time pressure for merging ratings, AI, and detailed course info into one demo.
Designing a UI that shows rich details without overwhelming students.

🏆 Accomplishments that we're proud of

Built a working prototype that integrates reviews, AI advising, and course details in one place.
Successfully reverse-engineered university course data for real student context.
Created a student-first design that feels more approachable than existing university systems.
Learned and applied new tools (Pickaxe, Figma, Hostinger) within just 48 hours.

📚 What we learned

How to creatively merge university data, AI tools, and student needs.
Reverse-engineering APIs and structuring academic datasets.
Using Replit, Figma, Hostinger, and Pickaxe for rapid development.
Designing around real student workflows (ratings, prerequisites, credit transfers).
That with limited time, the right tools make rapid prototyping possible.

🔮 What’s next for Semicolon ;)

Partner with Adelaide University to expand SmartCourse Advisor during and after the merger.
Scale features: import full catalogues, live enrolment integration, and advanced AI planning.
Mobile app version for on-the-go recommendations.
Community-driven reviews: incentivise more students to leave course ratings and tags.
Integration with official systems for automated prerequisites, enrolment checks, and credit transfers.