Scrollify!

Inspiration

Tiktok, Reels, Shorts... These shortform content has been rotting our brains inside and out. Instead of scrolling for endless amounts of dopamine and pleasure, we decided to create Scrollify to study instead!

What it does

Scrollify allows you to create your playlists filled with flashcards that you can scroll and learn with. Understand the concept? Click check and scroll on! Don't understand? That's okay, look at the answers and keep scrolling! It will eventually return to your feed. Each item also allows you to have personalized notes attached! With Scrollify, you are able to personalize your experience and have many playlists of knowledge for you to study with!

How we built it

We built Scrollify with a tireless amount of effort. We used JavaScript through NodeJS and ReactJS with the help of MongoDB as our database. Through trial and error, we managed to design a simplified version of our app.

Challenges we ran into

There were a lot of challenges we ran into. Three major challenges were:

Using MongoDB as our database For us, this was our first time using third-party software to create an external database. Learning and connecting the database to our front end proved to be a difficult challenge for us due to the time constraint.

Generating playlists using AI Initially, we planned to include PDF scanning with LLMs as a feature to generate playlists as opposed to manually creating and adding questions, however, we ran into difficulties while trying to implement the PDF uploading and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to scan the PDF, and it was harder than expected to finish by the deadline.

Collaborating on the same repository Another major challenge was dividing up the work. In particular, we found it difficult to assign tasks to everyone when two of us were working on the codebase, since without careful consideration of task assignment, we could run into a lot of merge conflicts. Furthermore, we ran into problems early in the hackathon while trying to clone the repository and have everyone working on the project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are immensely proud of our backend and the logic that is written to handle the initial idea. Through hours of debugging and setbacks, we were able to (almost) complete the implementation of our idea. We are also very proud of our Figma prototype, as it really brings the features of our idea to life.

What we learned

We learned to carefully draw out a plan before we started coding. Hours into the hackathon, we became quite stuck and lost about how the flow of our app looked. We sat down for 20 minutes, drew out a map of all the pages of our app, and the implementation of our app became very clear.