LaTeXLatte

LaTeXLatte logo

Inspiration

As a software engineering student who writes notes in LaTeX, Mars found that there were no solutions for creating and easily generating flashcards from their notes. When brainstorming ideas, the team noticed alliteration between LaTeX and Latte, hence the coffee theme.

What it does

LaTeXLatte allows a user to upload .tex files with custom commands that allows for the site to generate flashcards where students can view and study from. Flashcards are categorized by their corresponding course, which follows the standard naming convention of Carleton University and University of Ottawa.

How we built it

Using MongoDB and ExpressJS, the team built both a backend server to handle files and a frontend to browse and to study the flashcards.

Challenges we ran into

Dealing with regex, handling tex files, centering divs, and managing GitHub branches caused many problems for our team.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Considering this is our first MLH-sponsored hackathon, we are proud to have a product with lots of functionality. We all learned many things and met many interesting and inspiring individuals which pushed us forward. As mentioned, there were many challenges, but we are proud to have solved our unique problems with unique solutions.

What we learned

Benjamin, while being the least experienced, contributed to the best of his ability, having learned server architecture and databases from scratch. Every team member learned a lot about writing code for servers, configuring files, regex, parsing data, using GitHub collaboratively, and most importantly, how to center a div

What's next for LaTeXLatte

For LaTeX notes writers like Mars, this tool is already extremely useful for generating flashcards. In the future, we would like to add multiplayer functionality, allowing students to gamify their studies and enjoy learning further.