UniGuide

Inspiration

Large urban campuses create three constant pain points for students: finding the right building quickly, discovering events happening in real time, and getting reliable academic guidance. At Wayne State University, where campus buildings are spread across downtown, traditional maps and fragmented university systems often leave students confused, late, or disconnected. We built UniGuide around the idea that campus life should feel connected and intuitive. If navigation, events, and advising all happen in one place, students can spend less time figuring things out and more time actually participating in campus life.

What it does

UniGuide is a campus experience platform built for WayneHacks4 that helps students answer three everyday questions in one system: Where do I need to go? What is happening on campus right now? What should I be doing academically next? It combines a live campus map with walking directions, event pins, building details, organization event posting, and an AI powered advisor. Students can search for buildings, view turn by turn walking routes, discover live events across campus, and get structured advising help based on their major, goals, and academic progress. Organizations can also create events and place outdoor or indoor event pins directly on the campus map.

How we built it

We built UniGuide as a layered full stack web application using Next.js, Mapbox, and Supabase-ready architecture. The app uses the App Router for page structure, with reusable React components powering the interactive map, event flows, and advising experience. Seeded campus and event data provide building details, live event pins, and fallback advising content. Shared logic in the app handles deterministic routing, event persistence, transcript parsing, and AI assistant behavior. A server side AI route connects to an NVIDIA hosted model for enhanced map chat and advising responses, while local fallback logic keeps the system fully functional even if the hosted model is unavailable. The result is a polished, resilient platform that feels reliable in both demo and real world scenarios.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was balancing ambitious features with hackathon speed. Combining live navigation, event discovery, organization workflows, and academic advising into one seamless product required careful scoping and modular design. Another challenge was making the AI useful without making the product dependent on it. Navigation and map actions needed to remain deterministic and trustworthy, while the advisor needed to provide helpful but safe recommendations. Designing a UI that felt polished, intuitive, and fast enough for live judging was also a major focus.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

We built a unified platform that solves multiple real student problems in one experience. UniGuide goes beyond a campus map by combining live event discovery, organization participation, and structured academic support in a single interface. We are especially proud of the interactive map experience, the smooth event and route flows, and the advisor AI that supports students with next step recommendations and prerequisite guidance. We also created a clean architecture that is scalable beyond the hackathon and could realistically be adopted by a university.

What we learned

We learned that students care most about simple, immediate value. The strongest products are not the ones with the most features, but the ones that make everyday pain points feel easier. We also learned that trust matters in AI experiences. For both navigation and advising, the system needs to feel dependable and transparent. Finally, we learned the value of strong modular architecture under time pressure. Building in layers allowed us to move quickly without sacrificing quality.

What’s next for UniGuide

Next, we want to expand UniGuide into a production ready student platform. This includes real organization authentication, university calendar integrations, live campus notifications, deeper advising support tied to degree requirements, and richer indoor navigation for major buildings. We also want to explore partnerships with universities so UniGuide can become a true campus companion that improves student engagement, retention, and success.