Inspiration
Tools like Google Calendar and Notion are amazing at organizing tasks, but they don’t push students to actually do the work. Even from our own experiences as new college freshmen, we kept experiencing the same thing: beautifully organized to-do lists with every detail noted down, yet constant procrastination. Seeing dozens of assignments, meetings, and events clumped together added more stress than motivation to get the job done. However, as our first midterm season arose, we noticed something that did work when studying for discrete math in an in-person group. It was accountability - having other people studying the exact same topic expecting you to show up. AscendEd was born from that gap: turning organization into action by connecting students with peers who share their subject, schedule, and goals.
What it does
AscendEd is an online social platform where students can create or join subject-based study groups in the AscendEd community. Once users sign in with their Google account, they can create subject-based study groups and schedule focused sessions by specifying the subject, topic, date, and time. Each session is automatically synced with Google Calendar, ensuring students never miss a study opportunity. When a new session is created, it appears on the “Open Sessions” page, where other students studying the same subject can request to join. Upon approval, participants can seamlessly add the session to their own calendars and access a dedicated Google Meet room with a single click. This integrated setup allows students to jump straight into group discussions, share resources, and collaborate in real time without juggling multiple apps. By making it easy to discover, join, and participate in structured study groups, AscendEd builds a supportive community where students actually follow through, stay accountable, and learn together.
How we built it
Our main tech stack consisted of Django, HTML/CSS/JS, Google Cloud API, and SQLite for database management. We utilized Django for the full stack of the application, adding in HTML/CSS/JS for the front end. With the Google Cloud API, we added secure authentication into our application and were able to access Google Calendar and Google Meet functions, which became part of the core functionality of our app. SQLite was used to manage all the study session groups that are created and stored, allowing us to freely store and manipulate our data.
Challenges we ran into
Due to personal responsibilities, our team was unable to meet up until 9:30 PM on Saturday, leaving us with just 12 hours to plan, discuss, create and present our idea. This was a huge constraint and really stopped us from doing as much as we would have liked to. Along with this time constraint, we also had only two members in our team and this was our first actual hackathon. All of these challenges accumulated to become major challenges which we had to overcome throughout the course of the project. In fact, this was one of our proudest achievements: being able to overcome these significant challenges and finishing with a product that we are proud of.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The accomplishment that we are most proud of is being able to implement this idea, which we are passionate about, with significant time constraints and challenges blocking our way. While there were many other roadblocks along the way, such as the Google Cloud API limiting access to certain pieces of data and collaborating over GitHub, our biggest challenge was time. We are proud to have overcome that challenge and accomplished most of our goals.
What we learned
With this being our first Hackathon, we learned the value of prioritizing smaller-scale milestones rather than directly aiming for large chunks of progress. Due to the time-constrained environment of a Hackathon, setting reasonable goals and prioritizing well-planned goals is better than ideating complex features. This was a mistake we made when we started, as we jotted down some ideas about potentially adding supplementary AI facilities. However, we soon came to realize how precious time is in a hackathon, giving us precious insight into fast-paced decision-making and the concept of tradebacks.
What's next for AscendEd
We’re excited to continue improving AscendEd beyond HackTX and transform it into a large platform that supports every student’s learning journey. One of our top priorities is implementing personalized session recommendations by incorporating user data such as location, school, major, and past activity. This will allow AscendEd to suggest specific study sessions that are most relevant to each student’s academic goals. We also plan to integrate a smart scheduling feature that considers a user’s existing Google Calendar events to prevent conflicts and recommend sessions that best fit their availability. Additionally, we aim to introduce campus and school verification to help students connect with peers from the same institution, creating a more trusted and collaborative environment. Finally, we plan to implement an automated content moderation system to detect and prevent inappropriate or harmful session postings, ensuring the platform remains safe and welcoming for all users. We hope AscendEd will evolve from a small social network to a global platform that connects students around the world.
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