Student Success Roadmap

An AI-powered academic advisor delivering customized university admission roadmaps, IB IA audits, and tailored productivity workflows for neurodivergent students, created by students for students.

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Inspiration

The true inspiration for this project comes from my family and my community. My mom is a Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA), and through volunteering directly at her therapy center, I had the privilege of working firsthand with autistic children. Seeing the unique structural, sensory, and transition frameworks required to help them thrive made me realize how underserved neurodivergent students are by traditional, rigid educational tools. I wanted to build an academic planner that didn't just track deadlines, but actively accommodated executive dysfunction.

What it does

The Student Success Roadmap is an all-in-one AI-driven academic optimization and behavioral scaffolding platform. For traditional tracks (such as the International Baccalaureate and Ontario Secondary School Diploma systems), it calculates competitive admission metrics, maps prerequisite alignments, and provides full International Baccalaureate (IB) Internal Assessment (IA) examiner-level rubric audits. Crucially, the app features a specialized Neurodivergent Focus Portal that generates high-stimulation, dopamine-optimized tracking levels for students with ADHD, and explicit, predictable micro-step visual schedules for students with autism, complete with functional deep-work sprint execution timers.

How we built it

The application was built entirely in Python, leveraging Streamlit to handle the user interface, session states, and multi-page routing mechanics. The intelligent backend logic is powered by the Groq API, utilizing the ultra-fast llama-3.3-70b-versatile large language model to parse academic profiles and generate precise, hyperlinked milestone maps. Local configuration settings and environment variables are managed securely using the python-dotenv library to abstract sensitive operational parameters from the raw source code.

Challenges we ran into

The absolute biggest roadblock was managing local environment security and API credential ingestion. Transitioning away from hardcoded variables led to an incredibly frustrating battle with local environment configurations. We ran into invisible file extensions where Windows silently appended hidden formats, creating a .env.txt file that Python completely ignored. Even after forcing terminal creations, we ran into an aggressive UnicodeDecodeError ($0xff$ byte mismatch) caused by Windows PowerShell default UTF-16 encoding. Solving this required writing a custom encoding-resilient wrapper to dynamically fallback across multiple structural decoders.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are incredibly proud of taking this application from a blank script to a fully operational, live ecosystem. More than just writing functional code, we are proud of the organic innovation that happened during development. We didn't settle for a basic planner; we actively iterated on the design to introduce entirely new modules, like the live, interactive examiner workspace for IB IAs and the customized behavioral scaffolding forms.

What we learned

This project was a massive learning experience on both an empathetic and a technical level. I gained a much deeper understanding of my mom’s behavioral psychology field and the exact environmental modifications required by neurodivergent learners. On the technical side, I leveled up my programming skills immensely. I learned how production-grade applications handle API integration, how dotfiles protect data, and how to read dense terminal stack traces to debug real-world syntax errors and structural misalignments.

What's next for Student Success Roadmap

Moving forward, we want to scale this platform horizontally and vertically. We plan to expand the Standard Stream to encompass alternative global high school metrics such as Advanced Placement (AP), Sci-Tech, International Business and Technoloy (IBT), and Specialized Regional Arts programs and even going as far as expanding to other global programs. Furthermore, we intend to scale the Neurodivergent Portal to include adults transitioning into the workforce with specialized career placement maps, while expanding our clinical scaffolding parameters to support individuals with other executive and learning disabilities.

Built With

  • groq-api-key
  • llama-3.3-70b
  • os&codecs
  • python
  • python-dotenv
  • streamlit
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