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  Dashboard

Sprout

Helping students discover their academic interests—organically.

🌱 Inspiration

In open-exploration classrooms, students are encouraged to follow their curiosity. But with so many directions to explore, teachers often struggle to understand what interests are developing beneath the surface. Sprout was created to visualize these learning journeys and support students as they grow toward future academic or career paths.

🌿 What It Does

Sprout is a classroom tool that maps a student’s evolving interests based on their natural questions.

Students type in any question they’re curious about. Sprout sends it to the Gemini API, which:

1. Generates an answer to the question
   
2. Classifies which academic field or subfield the question belongs to
   

These interactions are stored and visualized as a radial tree, revealing patterns over time. Teachers and students can use these insights to:

• Identify emerging interests
  
• Support self-guided exploration
  
• Discover potential majors, future studies, and careers
  

Sprout turns everyday curiosity into meaningful insight—helping interests take root and grow.

🛠️ How We Built It

• Frontend: Next.js for a fast, reactive UI
  
• Backend: Node.js + Express to handle requests and process Gemini responses
  
• Database: MongoDB for storing queries, fields, and student interest history
  
• AI Integration: Gemini API for question answering + academic classification
  
• Visualization: A radial tree structure to map topic clusters and learning pathways
  

The architecture is modular and designed for classroom scalability.

🚧 Challenges We Ran Into

• Creating an academic classification system that works across many disciplines
  
• Keeping long-term interest data structured and meaningful
  
• Ensuring fast, seamless AI interactions
  
• Visualizing complex branching data in a student-friendly way
  
• Balancing openness of exploration with usable analytics
  

🎉 Accomplishments We’re Proud Of

• Building a smooth end-to-end system from input → AI → visualization
  
• Designing an intuitive tool that enhances classroom exploration
  
• Making academic mapping visually engaging through the radial tree
  
• Demonstrating how AI can empower curiosity-driven learning
  

📚 What We Learned

• Integrating real-time AI into educational tools
  
• Building data structures that mirror human curiosity
  
• Simplifying complex academic domains for younger audiences
  
• Importance of clean, clear UI in data-heavy visualizations
  

🌻 What’s Next for Sprout

• Teacher dashboard for class-wide insights
  
• Personalized recommendations for related topics and fields
  
• Timeline views of interest development
  
• Topic filtering by depth, frequency, or clusters
  
• Integration with platforms like Google Classroom
  
• More robust major and career pathway guidance

Built With

• nextjs