HackTheStudentSyllabus

Inspiration

As students, we spend countless hours reading through PDFs and PDFs of various course syllabi attempting to schedule midterms, assignment deadlines and important course dates. This process is extremely time consuming for what seems like a simple task, but this simple task can put you on track for the entire semester and give you that foundation to succeed in university. This is so important that an entire 10% of APS100 is dedicated to making sure every engineering student has this basics down.

What it does

Our project aims to tackle this problem and inconvenience by automating the creation of a laid out calendar and allowing one to implement this calendar into your preferred calendar app. The website takes in student's syllabus and scrape through and automatically create events for assignments, midterms, quizzes and anything that is important at the exact time they are due. The website will allow you to download a .ics that can be imported into any popular calendar app.

How we built it

We built a basic HTML and CSS front-end website and used a Flask Webserver to process the PDFs uploaded by the user. We then used OpenAI's ChatGPT API and parsed through the PDF to generate the important course deadlines and content.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into several challenges. Our biggest challenge was hosting the website and Flask Web server on AWS as doing so required us to implement a VM which could not be completed in the given time frame. We tried other ways including building a database on AWS to prevent using a Flask Backend webserver but since this was the first time many of us used AWS, we could not implement the project successfully on AWS.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have built this project from scratch in just 6 hours. While the project may not have been 100% successfully implemented, we are proud that we were able to present the Proof of Concept of an idea that can save students hundreds of hours of parsing through PDFs to schedule their calendars.

What we learned

We learnt vital AWS skills and also learnt skills in Prompt Engineering and API Integration which were software engineering techniques many of our team members had not used before.

What's next for HackTheStudentSyllabus

Our goal is to implement the project on AWS to make this more accessible to all UofT students. We also plan to include additional features using AI and ML such as Calendar Scheduling to improve the student experience.