StudyArena

Inspiration

The inspiration for the idea came from Kahoot, EECS 203 problem roulette, and leetcode.

What it does

StudyArena lets students upload their own course PDFs and instantly generates a multiplayer quiz from the content. Players join a room with a code, compete in real-time to answer AI-generated questions, and see a live scoreboard at the end. It turns any lecture slide or textbook into a Kahoot-style study session.

How we built it

We used Next.js and Tailwind for the frontend, Node.js with Express and Socket.IO for the backend, and PostgreSQL with Prisma for the database. AI question generation is powered by Google Gemini, which reads extracted PDF text and produces multiple-choice questions. We used Figma for design and planning before writing any code.

Challenges we ran into

Getting real-time game state to sync correctly across all players was tricky — handling edge cases like players disconnecting mid-game or joining late required careful Socket.IO event management. Prompting Gemini to consistently return well-structured, accurate questions from messy PDF text also took significant iteration.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

We learned how much complexity lives in real-time multiplayer state management, and how powerful LLM-based content generation can be when paired with structured prompting.