StudiousTransport

Inspiration

As Carleton University students, we know what it's like to spend 2-3 hours commuting every day. We always complained about the fact that we would waste those hours and wouldn't be able to get anything done. That's when we came up with the idea of making an app that can help people be productive while in commute.

What it does

It is a textbook reader app that takes a textbook pdf and reads it into a better format. It is usually hard to read a textbook in the bus, and so this app will allow you to change the font and theme of the background so that you can read it easily. Furthermore, it will take in important terms in the glossary and move it to a separate doc that is separated by sections. It will then highlight those terms.

How we built it

We broke down the tasks into a few main parts.

Reading the pdf
Processing the pdf
Creating the front end
Hosting the app We decided to use python libraries like pdfplumber and ntlk to read the pdf and its images. We then used Vue JS to build the front end and Vercel to host the app.

Challenges we ran into

We first wanted to use NextJS since we were somewhat familiar with it, but we ran into a lot of problems and decided to move away from it and go to Vue JS since we believed that its capabilities would work well for us to make a single page application.

The python libraries had version problems in that certain methods that we thought we could use didn't exist in the latest version, but if we went back to that version, some newer methods would be missing. We had to scour the documentation to find the proper way of using other methods and trying to work out a way to actually take in the pdfs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to build an app with a new React framework, a new hosting platform and with new processing libraries. The fact that we were able to change from NextJS halfway through shows that we can adapt and overcome challenges and that is something that we are proud of.

What we learned

We were able to learn so much in a such a short time and we able to apply the things that we learned directly. Most of us have hardly done front end so we had to learn some of the basics of React. At the same time we had to try and use a hosting platform we've never used, as well as some processing libraries we've never heard about or used before. Our true goal for our first hackathon was to come out with many more skills, so we're extremely happy that we were able able to meet it.

What's next for StudiousTransport

We initially had many more plans for Studious Transport, but we fell short of being able to implement those features. For example, we wanted to add a text-to-speech feature for those with disabilities like blindness or those with different learning styles like auditory learning. The next step for us is to continue learning so that we can create many more incredible features for an app that technically has infinite possibilities.