LearnBoard

Inspiration

Students today face growing mental health challenges from overwhelming workloads, constant deadlines, and competing priorities. This stress is often worsened by a lack of clear organization, making it hard to prioritize and manage tasks effectively. My task board helps by providing a simple, visual system to break down work, set priorities, and track progress. By reducing mental clutter, it supports student wellbeing and empowers them to stay focused and in control. We were tired of juggling scattered notes, to-do apps, and study tools, so we built a single board that does it all. task lists, AI prioritization, automatic scheduling, and even Pomodoro focus: all in one minimal interface. Also we were inspired by the Trello task board app and wanted to make something similar without having to pay for premium.

What it does

Create & organize lists: Add as many columns as you want for different projects or subjects, and drag-and-drop tasks between them. AI prioritization: With one click, LearnBoard uses AI to analyze and assign priority (high, medium, low) to every uncompleted task, factoring in deadlines. AI-generated schedule: Instantly generates a personalized schedule from your task list. It starts at 8 and you know exactly what to work on next. Pomodoro timer: Built-in focus timer helps you stay productive with work/break cycles. Data Saving: All your data saves in the browser, so no sign up or cloud is needed. Simple & clean UI: No distractions, just your tasks, priorities, and focus.

How we built it

Frontend: Vanilla HTML, CSS, and JS. Drag-and-drop, dark mode, and modal logic are all handled client-side. Backend: Node.js with Express, serving static files and acting as an API for AI features. AI: Uses OpenRouter’s DeepSeek for both prioritization and daily schedule generation. Other tools: Marked for any markdown parsing, localStorage for offline sync, and CORS/body-parser/dotenv for fast dev setup.

Challenges we ran into

Ensuring the AI always returns valid JSON for priorities. Handling markdown, line breaks, and weird formatting from AI responses. Making drag-and-drop work smoothly between columns and the trash bin.