VTA | Devpost

Inspiration

Students get busier and busier, with schedules that don't always allow for them to get the personlized help they wish for. Whether students need some guidance on a specific question when no TA's or professors are available, or if they want a question answered within the scope of a class, it can be very difficult to get the proper help you wish for.

What it does

VTA is a classroom website that stands for Virtual Teaching Assistant. Each class can be joined by students which are made the professor, who uploads course specific material into the database. From that, students can ask general questions or ask for guidance to the "VTA", which will give it personlized help using and consistent with the class terminology, structure, and examples.

How we built it

For the account management, we used auth0 for the sign-in mechanics to keep track of the user, their account, and their classes. For the chat feature, we used OpenAI and have it run based on commands to limit the information it can use only to the material uploaded (by the professor), so tailor each class specifically to each professor and class. The rest of front-end development and connecting was mainly with React (MUI), and fastapi.

Challenges we ran into

One of the first challenges we had was what to demo in our submission. There were a lot of ideas, however it was difficult to choose how to go about them. After talking with a judge about their view on projects, we decided to focus on a specific issue we felt we faced a lot in school, and make the focus of the project solving that issue (getting personliazed aid when needed). Another challenge was a steep learning curve for some areas, as most of us have never used SQLite or auth0 before. Whilst we could've used something else, to make this project possible as a whole, we decided to go through with these new topics and learn as we go. We ended up not only finishing the project, but learning about some new frameworks too!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

When the chat feature started functioning soley based on the material given, it was the most accomplished we felt that day. That was the biggest step into finishing what we wanted to present, and then creating a project with a team we just formed on the day was a good expirience too!

What we learned

Our front-end developer used MUI to help with the design, which was a new and helpful expirience. Some backend engineers learned how to use new things like autho0 and SQLite, which both ended up being very useful, and something we wish to use in future projects.

What's next for VTA

We would like to add other features both on the professors side and the students side. For the professors, we would like for them to input the teaching style for the chat feature, so that the teaching assistant can he