BoilerSyllabi | Devpost

Home screen
The app is analyzing the pdf and the getting information about the professor.
The results are displayed in various categories.

Inspiration

Reading a long syllabus is always boring work. Especially at the start of every semester, reading through all syllabi and trying not to be confused about each other is torture. Therefore, we decided to make a program to automatically make a cool and concise summary of our syllabus.

What it does

BoilerSyllabi is an AI-powered platform designed to help you take control of your academic journey by simplifying your course syllabi. It takes a PDF syllabus file and utilize an LLM agent to make a cool, yet concise summary of the syllabus. It also provides web scraping services for the ratings and comments of Rate My Professor, and phrase them in a humorous manner.

How we built it

For the back end, we have two main parts: analyzing PDF and web scraping. For the analysis of pdf, we tune our prompt for Gemini API to turn pdf paragraphs into JSON that organizes information by categories. For web scraping, we searched for the professor's name and course number for the previous part in BoilerGrade and RateMyProfessor to get information. For the front end, we used javascript to create a page and embedded the home screen and analyzer screen. The framework we used was react and we utilized the official Purdue color scheme to make our website specific to Boilermakers!

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge is that the BoilerGrade webpage is a JavaScript-heavy website. Thus, we could not use simple functions like BeautifulSoup to get HTML, but need to carefully interact with the javascript part on the website with our code to get the statistics we want.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We created an application that can analyze and gather course information both accurately and concisely ⚡️.
We built a visually appealing interface for our application that fits the university's theme and easy for users to understand 🪄 .
We implanted several cool and also helpful ester eggs within our application (Try uploading a syllabus with Gustavo's name in it) ‼️.

What we learned

We gain experience using technologies like React and JavaScript for frontend development, alongside Flask, Gemini API, and web scraping for backend tasks. Additionally, we practiced soft skills in product design, teamwork, project development, and presentation.

What's next for BoilerSyllabi

The goal is to expand beyond Purdue by supporting the collection of syllabi from other colleges. It also involves integrating more functions, such as web scraping from additional resources and automatically adding class schedules to Google Calendar. Visualizations will be enhanced with features like word clouds, animations, and Google Maps for class buildings. Additionally, users will have access to customized options, including personalized designs and layouts.