StruggleSense

Inspiration

Many students struggle academically not because they lack ability, but because they lose motivation, fall behind on foundational concepts, or do not receive timely feedback on what they actually understand. Traditional studying, reading notes or reviewing slides, often creates an illusion of understanding.

Educational research shows that active learning significantly improves outcomes, and gamified systems can increase engagement, especially for students with attention difficulties such as ADHD. We wanted to build a system that helps students actively practice concepts, stay motivated, and identify knowledge gaps early.

What it does

StruggleSense is an AI-powered adaptive study system that turns lecture materials into interactive learning experiences. Students upload lecture notes or assignments, and our application:

extracts key concepts and definitions from lecture notes or homework sheets
generates flashcards, quizzes, and games with the concepts
tracks performance on each concept
identifies weak knowledge areas
provides personalized study recommendations
shows user's progress through Star Jars

This allows students to move from passive studying to active practice with immediate feedback, helping them focus on the concepts they actually need to improve.

How we built it

We started by looking into why students fail and found two common reasons: lack of motivation and lack of preparation. To address this, we wanted to make studying more engaging and interactive. We combined the programming tools our team was familiar with to build a full-stack system.

Frontend: Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS
Game Client: Unity
Backend: Python, FastAPI, Pydantic, SQLAlchemy
Database: Supabase, PostgreSQL
AI: OpenAI Python SDK, Responses API, Structured Outputs

We built the system iteratively during the hackathon, experimenting with ideas quickly and prototyping features step by step.

Challenges we ran into

Our team members did not know each other before the hackathon, so we had to quickly coordinate and work together as a new team.

Technically, it was also our first time connecting Unity with a web frontend and backend system, which required experimentation and debugging.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built a working prototype that can:

convert uploaded materials into structured concepts
generate quizzes and flashcards automatically
track concept-level performance
provide personalized study recommendations We also designed a Star Jar system that visually shows a learner’s study progress.