Inspiration
Our group was inspired by the lack of readily available syllabi when deciding which classes to sign up for, and how hard it is to keep track of everything on the syllabi for classes we're currently in. SyllaJay pulls out all of the important information from syllabi, like the class schedule and whether or not there's any exams, so that we don't have to keep going back and rereading syllabi.
What it does
SyllaJay uses OpenAI to pull the important information out of syllabi and present them in an easy-to-manage way. It associates syllabi with their classes, so users can upload a syllabus if their class doesn't have one uploaded yet in our database or if the one listed is out of date. Users interested in taking a particular class can also access the syllabus from SyllaJay, assuming that it's already in our database.
How we built it
SyllaJay was built in NextJs using a mix of Typescript, Tailwind, and Python. Our frontend was built with Typescript and the Tailwind component library DaisyUI. We used a PostgreSQL database to store classes and users, with NextAuth for authentication. Finally, our AI API was built in Python using OpenAI.
Challenges we ran into
One of the biggest challenges we ran into was trying to figure out what to prioritize. SyllaJay has a lot of moving parts but only three of us, so we weren't able to finish everything that we wanted to. We also ran into trouble with the AI, we realized that it was a toss-up whether or not we'd have enough time to train it and ended up switching to OpenAI last minute.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
This was our first time incorporating Python into our development process, which was exciting. We were also able to fully plan out our theme (like color scheme) before development, which saved us some time contemplating later on and also gave us a clear direction in terms of how the website would look. Additionally, we've always talked about incorporating AI into one of our projects, and it feels like this time we weren't using AI just for the sake of using AI, we had a clear goal and felt that it would legitimately be the best tool for the job.
What we learned
As this is our final HopHacks as undergraduates, I think we learned this year that the past few years of coding really paid off. In previous years, we basically presented ideas instead of products because we weren't well versed in web development and definitely couldn't do it quickly, but this time we were able to make an actual website, despite it not being completely done yet.
What's next for SyllaJay
We would like to continue working on our algorithm so that we can pull even more information from syllabi, like whether or not a class has any late days for homework. We also hope to incorporate a schedule of sorts so that people can keep track of when their assignments are due, similar to Notion but without the manual input process.
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