Inspiration Studying can get messy fast: tabs pile up, important ideas are hard to follow, and existing tools often wait for you to notice a problem and ask for help. We wanted to make a study companion that feels present without becoming another chatbot to manage.
That companion is Stick: a small animated character who makes the browser’s help visible and approachable.
What it does STICK is a Firefox study companion with an animated stickman and a sidebar for study tasks, saved notes, summaries, and activity.
It groups related tabs into task workspaces, offers optional help when reading signals suggest a passage may need another look, and lets users select text to ask Stick to summarise or paraphrase it—or save it with its source. Paraphrasing animates Stick erasing and rewriting the selected text, with an undo option. Users can also review spelling suggestions and snooze inactive tabs in a group.
The user stays in control: reading help is offered rather than silently applied, and selected text is only changed after the user chooses the action.
How we built it We built STICK as a Firefox extension using JavaScript and the WebExtensions APIs. Its sidebar brings together task groups, notes, summaries, and recent activity. A separate sprite-based animation module gives Stick a predictable action API, so the extension can trigger animations without needing to know how the sprite sheets work.
Challenges we ran into We had limited time and several moving parts to bring together: browser APIs, animation assets, extension messaging, and features that should work on real pages. Making Stick’s sprite animations feel consistent across different page layouts took iteration. We also had to be careful not to treat reading behaviour as proof that someone was confused, or make changes to their writing without permission.
Accomplishments that we’re proud of We’re proud that Stick is more than a static mascot: he can move, react to study states, and animate text actions. We also built a working Firefox sidebar that brings task groups and saved study material together, plus a selection-based workflow for summarising, paraphrasing, and saving text.
What we learned We learned that a character can make an interface feel more understandable—but only if it’s connected to useful, predictable actions. We also learned to separate the animation system from the rest of the extension, and to design AI assistance so the user can review, undo, or decline changes.
What’s next for STICK Next, we’d like to improve the reading and proofreading signals, make AI-powered features easier to configure, and test with more real study workflows. We’d also like to explore Chrome support and broaden compatibility with editors that don’t expose ordinary page text.
One accuracy note: don’t claim automatic tab snoozing—snoozing is currently a user-triggered action on inactive tabs.