schoolsync | Devpost

Inspiration

School life can quickly become overwhelming. Assignments, quizzes, presentations, deadlines, and announcements are often scattered across different places, making it difficult for students to know what they need to do and what they should prioritize.

We wanted to create something that makes schoolwork feel more organized without requiring students to spend even more time organizing it. This inspired us to build SchoolSync — a student-focused dashboard that turns messy school information into an actionable plan.

What We Built

SchoolSync is an AI-powered school productivity tool that helps students organize their academic workload.

Students can paste messy information such as assignments, announcements, emails, or reminders into SchoolSync. The AI analyzes the information and turns it into structured tasks with:

📚 Subject 📅 Due date 🔥 Priority ⏱️ Estimated time 💡 Reason for the recommendation

The tasks are saved in the dashboard and displayed on a dynamic calendar, allowing students to see their workload at a glance. Students can mark tasks as completed, track their overall progress, and see which task SchoolSync recommends tackling next.

How We Built It

We built SchoolSync as a web application using Next.js, React, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS. We used an AI API to process natural-language school information and convert it into structured tasks.

We also implemented browser-based storage so that tasks remain available after refreshing the page. The calendar dynamically maps tasks to their corresponding dates, while the dashboard calculates completion progress and recommends the next task based on priority.

We used GitHub and Vercel for version control and deployment, allowing us to continuously test and deploy the project as we developed it.

Challenges We Faced

One of our biggest challenges was making the AI-generated information work reliably with the rest of the application. Dates can be written in many different ways, such as "tomorrow," "Friday," or an exact date, so we had to build logic to convert these into calendar-friendly dates.

We also encountered issues with tasks disappearing after refreshes and making sure newly created tasks appeared correctly on the calendar. Debugging the interaction between React state, browser storage, AI-generated data, and the calendar was an important part of the development process.

Another challenge was keeping the interface simple while still providing useful information. We wanted SchoolSync to feel like a tool students could actually use every day rather than an overly complicated productivity system.

What We Learned

Building SchoolSync taught us how different parts of a modern web application work together — from frontend state management and persistent storage to API integration, AI processing, date handling, and deployment.

Most importantly, we learned that building a useful AI project isn't just about adding AI. The AI needs to solve a real problem and integrate naturally into a product that people can actually use.

SchoolSync is our attempt to make school life a little less chaotic and help students spend less time organizing their work and more time actually doing it.