Wisdom Widget

Take notes on your computer like never before! Wisdom Widget with the help of AI will help you annotate, explain, and save work from websites to help you understand in the moment and study later!

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Inspiration

Our team's passion for education and empowering students is the driving force behind the creation of Wisdom Widget. We believe in education and the critical role technology can play in enhancing learning experiences. We understand the challenges students face in managing coursework, comprehending complex texts, and effectively studying. Hence, we were inspired to develop an app that not only simplifies these tasks but also enriches their learning. Wisdom Widget embodies our commitment to providing students with a comprehensive tool that aids note-taking, explains text, organizes study materials, and tracks assignments and classes. Creating Wisdom Widget is our way of contributing to a world where education is more accessible, efficient, and engaging, believing that such innovations can significantly impact students worldwide.

What it does

Wisdom Widget is both a Chrome extension and a dashboard connected to a backend for synchronization. With Wisdom Widget, you can access your dashboard to view all your classes and the assignments you have for those classes. Want to do research for your class? Simply navigate to any website and activate our Chrome extension. Our extension, with the help of Artificial Intelligence, allows you to highlight text on the page and choose to either save that annotation, explain the annotation, or identify keywords in the highlighted text and provide resources to delve deeper into those topics. All this information can be saved back to your dashboard, where you can store the knowledge you've gathered to study later!

How we built it

Our application is built from four major components. We have our Chrome extension, which injects an iFrame into the DOM of websites and hosts a React app, allowing users to interact with our app directly. Additionally, we have our dashboard, which is also a React app and is hosted online. Due to the nature of React, both of our frontend parts were made using JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. We utilized Bootstrap to enhance our UI/UX design. For the backend, we used Express.js to process all of our routes and communicate with our Firestore database. Without a consistent team effort, we would not have been able to integrate all of these moving parts successfully.

Challenges we ran into

As described above, managing so many moving parts proved to be quite challenging. We faced significant difficulties in synchronizing our two frontend components and ensuring they communicated effectively with the backend simultaneously. Additionally, we encountered issues with some of our API calls, which did not consistently return the same results, leading to difficulties in maintaining consistency across our routes. Moreover, we experienced last-minute database issues, including an unexpected deletion just an hour before our deadline! Fortunately, we were able to overcome these challenges through teamwork.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

No one on the Wisdom Widget team had prior experience with creating a Chrome extension. Nevertheless, the entire team was incredibly proud of the project we created and seeing it all come together in the end was truly gratifying. Since we each specialized in different aspects, seeing the project unite as a cohesive whole was amazing. It gave us a chance to appreciate the work everyone had contributed. We were also pleased with our planning; it ensured that integrating our individual parts went smoothly with minimal problems.

What we learned

The Wisdom Widget team gained extensive knowledge in full-stack development and learned how to create our first Chrome extension. Additionally, working as a team within such a short timeframe was a novel experience for many of us. We had never before needed to plan a project so quickly and comprehensively. We acquired many valuable skills, including proper planning of database structure and early creation of templates for our routes, which enabled us to eventually connect everything seamlessly.

What's next for Wisdom Widget

Wisdom Widget has many features still left to explore! The Wisdom Widget team is eager to continue developing the application to include group assignments, where students can collectively share notes on the dashboard. We also aim to create an automated citation resource. Our app can track all the websites you visit while completing a specific assignment and then export the list of sites in a specific format. Furthermore, we plan to enable notes to be downloadable in any format the user prefers.

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