Rubric

A better way to navigate through your course materials

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Inspiration

Students juggle too many platforms. We built Rubric to unify them—a "personal academic assistant" that centralizes Moodle, tools, and AI into one hub.

What it does

Rubric is an intelligent dashboard connecting your university LMS with:

  • Unified Dashboard: All courses and resources in one modern interface.
  • AI-Powered Assistant: Athena (our chatbot) helps you study and generates quizzes from your actual course PDFs.
  • Smart Scheduling & Collaboration: Weekly calendar views and real-time whiteboards for group study.
  • DigitalOcean Power: High-performance backend handling real-time data and automation.

How we built it (The DigitalOcean Backbone)

We architected a full-stack solution that relies heavily on the power and flexibility of DigitalOcean:

  • Infrastructure: We deployed a high-performance DigitalOcean Droplet as the central nervous system. It creates a robust environment for our Node.js/Express backend and custom MCP (Model Context Protocol) server.
  • Complex Automation: The Droplet handles heavy lifting like Playwright headless browser automation, allowing us to scrape and sync Moodle data securely without lagging the frontend.
  • Stack: React + TypeScript (Frontend) connected to our DigitalOcean-hosted backend services.

Challenges we ran into

  • Moodle SSO & Auth: University Microsoft logins are notoriously hard to automate. We solved this by spinning up a remote browser environment on our DigitalOcean Droplet, allowing users to complete the login challenge manually while the server captured the session tokens.
  • Session Persistence: Keeping Moodle sessions alive required a reliable backend; DigitalOcean's uptime ensured our session management system never faltered.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Architectural Victory: Successfully hosting a complex mix of backend tools, MCP servers, and API services on a single, efficient DigitalOcean Droplet.
  • Seamless Integration: Reverse-engineering the LMS structure to fetch files and generate AI quizzes instantly.
  • Reliability: Thanks to DigitalOcean, the connection between our scraping engine and the frontend is incredibly stable.

What we learned

  • DigitalOcean is a Beast: We realized just how much you can throw at a single Droplet. From serving APIs to running complex automation, the performance was flawless.
  • Playwright + Cloud: Running headless browsers in a cloud production environment is powerful when backed by the right infrastructure.
  • MCP Protocol: Building custom tools for AI context is the future of student assistants.

What's next for Rubric

  • Mobile App: React Native version.
  • Study Analytics: Tracking focus and performance.
  • Calendar Sync: Google/Apple integration.
  • More LMS Support: Expanding to Canvas and Blackboard using our scalable DigitalOcean backend.
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