Studious

Inspiration

One day, frustrated of searching through an entire textbook for the solution to one problem, the Studious team came together to find a quicker method of learning. Looking for the relevant passages manually was cumbersome; existing "solution search" applications, such as Toppr and Chegg, give out answers outright, removing the learning involved. Studious was created as a happy medium: removing the tedious, braindead portions of studying without taking away any of the joy of learning.

What it does

When the user is stuck on a homework problem, they can submit the problem and the textbook to Studious. Studious will scan the textbook and show the user the paragraph the answer is in.

How we built it

Our final plan would have included both a server running on AWS and a sleek, modern client-side UI built with React. Ther server would have handled the expensive computation, like OCR and natural language processing, while the client would have handled the user input and displaying the raw data.

Challenges we ran into

Learning how to properly set up an AWS server is very difficult on a short timeline, and we also didn't decide on the final structure for our app until over the halfway point. Both of these caused significant slowdowns.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We got the PDF OCR working, and also developed an algorithm to use the text it outputs combined with a transcription of the question to produce the most useful paragraph. Even though the UI and online functionality might not be there, we managed to get quite far on the technical side.

What we learned

We familiarized ourselves with the development process, pipeline coding, and all the software (flutter, nltk, aws) implemented in the project. We also learned valuable lessons about project management skills.

What's next for Studious

We're looking to partner with leading textbook companies to integrate our software into their online textbook platforms. In doing so, we'll reach a wider audience of students and increase the benefit our innovation will have for society.