Nook

Find your focus. Find your people.

Inspiration: Every UT student knows the struggle: you walk to the library, it’s packed, the outlets are taken, and you walk somewhere else. Google tells you a place exists, but not whether you can actually study there right now. We wanted an app that answers “where can I focus right now?” and that makes studying a little less lonely.

What it does: Shows a map of popular study spots, such as libraries or coffee shops, colored by how well they match the user's study preferences. The app ranks spots by your study style: silent, loud, outlets, open late, solo or group. Each spot page shows hourly busyness, a short AI summary of the vibe from real reviews, and where that information comes from. Social: follow friends, see where they’re studying, bookmark spots, and find people who study like you.

How we built it:

Mobile app: Expo / React Native, with a shared design system built in Figma
Place data: SerpApi’s Google Maps APIs for places, popular times, photos, and reviews.
AI: Meta’s Muse Spark turns reviews into vibe tags and summaries, writes each user’s “study vibe,” and provides a chatbot to answer the user's questions.
Backend: Supabase

Challenges we ran into:

Splitting the work across four people on Windows and Mac, with shared contracts so everyone could build in parallel.
Expo Go version mismatches, plus venue Wi-Fi blocking phone-to-laptop connections.
Getting the UI to look smooth and proportional.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of:

A complete visual identity and design system in one night, including a custom logo drawn from a whiteboard sketch.
Creating a tool that utilizes APIs and AI in a variety of ways.

What we learned: