Stu-Net - Just take it easy

Inspiration

The IThinkUPC challenge and its possible outcomes attracted us and we decided to tackle it. Since we've all been freshmen, we know how frustrating and difficult it is to form project groups that fit with our skills and the project requirements. We also had the desire to let the students connect and collaborate proficiently during their university years, and also to feel less alone even if far from home.

What it does

The main functions of the app are:

Collaborative tool to share class notes. It's based on open-source AI models to analyze how good they sound and their accuracy compared to teacher's materials;
Smart tool to form groups for university assignments;
A messaging system to keep the group members connected.

How we built it

We started by designing the skeleton of the front-end in sveltkit, to get an idea of what to work on. Then, after the ideas started spreading, we moved on with developing the back-end functionalities using Python, Rust and JavaScript. All throughout the back-end development, we tested the features, firstly with some mock data, then with real data from the populated MongoDB database.

Challenges we ran into

Struggled with managing the authentication web tokens;
Multiple obstacles were encountered during the design of the algorithms to process the data;
Getting the Vueling bananas 🍌.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very proud to say that the demo app is ready to deploy and the basic functionalities are (almost) all operative! Also, we managed to overcome all the difficulties we met.

What we learned

We refreshed our knowledge of MongoDB after a long time;
We learned more about backend frameworks;
We had a first touch of the cool features provided by AI technologies;
The importance of good sleep when working hard.

What's next for Stu-Net - Just take it easy

We think that this idea could be developed further to get an improvement on the AI models used and find a sub-optimal group formation algorithm. Also, we could implement much more functionalities, all in a perspective of making the students more connected with each other, such as a video-call tool or a system for companies to "buy" the ideas the students developed for their projects.