Study Buddy

Inspiration

Socratic Teaching is a simple and classic philosophy to help student learning. It involves:

Having students explain a topic.
Asking questions to poke holes in the student's explanation. This exposes gaps in student knowledge. Sadly, it's not quite practical at scale -- needing a mentor to ask questions for every student is feasible in the modern education climate. However, LLMs can change that...

What it does

Study Buddy is an innovative web application designed to bridge the gap between teachers and students by integrating the Socratic method of teaching with the power of artificial intelligence.

There's a student and teacher interface, student chat logs, live access to fine-tuned versions of OpenAI's ChatGPT, points and rewards for active engagement, and teacher control of prompting and class content. The goal is to have a student pretend they are a teacher and start explaining a topic to StudyBuddy. StudyBuddy will chime in with questions to probe student knowledge -- making student understanding stronger.

How we built it

We used PyFlask, OAuth, and Tailwind for the front-end interfaces; MongoDB was used for the back-end data logging and collection for teachers. Hosted locally -- check our repo if interested.

Challenges we ran into

Tracking multiple accounts and users through Google account registry.
Taming OpenAI ChatBot behaviors.
MongoDB Websocket behaviors creating user errors.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Full access to personalized chat bots for student users.
Great customization and control of the classroom setting and chat bots for teachers.
Gamification of learning through currency -- brain points -- future implementation of a cosmetic shop for students to dress up avatars.

What we learned

Engaging interfaces and gamification take lots of effort and time to make intuitive.
Coordinating student and teachers via a webapp, like with Kahoot, is difficult but rewarding to implement.