StudyBuddie

Inspiration

In general, loneliness is an undesired feeling, especially during important moments like preparing for your next big exam or trying to understand content in a difficult class. We wanted to build a solution that prevents these unwanted feelings while improving your productivity.

What it does

StudyBuddie helps students discover study communities and find study buddies with whom the student resonates the most with. StudyBuddie doesn't just solve loneliness, it helps you create the new connections you actually desire based on your study habits and preferences.

How we built it

We first used Claude to assist us on prototyping and refining the visual representation of our mockups. We also set up our agentic workflow using Cursor as our project manager, who manages Claude for building the backend and Codex for building frontend. We also integrated Grok to find compatible new friend match. For the program validation, we mainly used internal testing and iterate based on the feedback we gathered.

Challenges we ran into

For everyone in our team, this was our first time working through a build or development process. As such, the initial stages were difficult for us to navigate. However, once we settled on an idea, the building process seemed to come naturally.

A specific technical challenge we ran into while we were implementing the backend is database management. We want to implement login credentials so that we can keep track of user information and keep refine our new friend matching algorithm. It took us a lot of trials and errors to figure out how to store our data safely and how to translate user activities into scores for improving our matching algorithm.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Using the Google Maps API from SerpAPI gave us flexibility to provide a visual representation of the location distribution of UT buildings, but for the purpose of StudyBuddie, much of this data was extraneous. Abstracting the data from the API and only taking what we needed was surprisingly difficult. We had to use additional map styling library and relabeling the whole map because we want to make the user interface simple. Ultimately, we finished layering on top of the Google Maps API and adding custom labels for displaying active users.

We needed to differentiate StudyBuddie from existing productivity apps. A main highlight of StudyBuddie is its ability to facilitate real human connection using academic productivity as the environment to do so. To do this, we built a messaging system and a live friends status update feature in our app, where you can communicate with friends and even send hypes to friends who are currently studying.

What we learned

As we created StudyBuddie, we discovered that building an app can start with a simple thought. It all begins with our experience as students, thinking about what we need. This was also our first time utilizing API tools, it's really cool to see how we can build on top of existing APIs to accelerate our building process.

What's next for StudyBuddie

Currently, the StudyBuddie app is configured to serve UT Austin students specifically. Our next step would be to generate versions of StudyBuddie based on data from any accredited university globally.