About the Project

🌍 Why We Built PairUp

Across campuses, many students quietly struggle with the same problems:

They do not know anyone in their classes
They study alone and lose motivation
They want to improve, but do not have accountability
They feel isolated even when surrounded by people

This isolation hurts grades, confidence, and mental health.

PairUp was created with a social good mission:
Make learning more collaborative, less lonely, and more equitable for every student.

We wanted to give any student, regardless of background or connections, a way to:

Find someone who studies like you and vibes like you.
Practice a little every day
Build a streak that feels encouraging, not overwhelming

Technology should not just optimize productivity. It should help people feel supported.

❤️ Inspiration

We were inspired by:

Friends who dropped courses because they felt they were struggling alone
International and first generation students who felt disconnected from their classmates
Students who only thrive when there is someone to check in with them
Research that shows how accountability can dramatically increase completion rates

We asked a simple question:

What if every student had someone who showed up with them every day?

PairUp is our answer: a small, daily, shared habit that can quietly transform a semester.

🌱 Social Impact

PairUp aims to create real social value for students by:

Reducing academic isolation: no one has to study alone every single day
Encouraging healthy habits: streaks and reminders reward small, sustainable efforts
Leveling support: students who do not have built in networks can still feel partnered and seen

🧠 What We Learned

Building PairUp taught us both technical and human lessons.

Human and social lessons

Consistency grows out of community, not just willpower
Small social signals like "You and your partner are on a 5 day streak" can have a big emotional impact
Tools for education should respect the reality of student life: stress, time pressure, and uneven support systems

Technical lessons

Learned to design micro-moment interactions so studying feels light, not like a task.
Built a pairing algorithm that matches users by both course overlap and personal vibe.
Calibrated AI question difficulty dynamically to avoid overwhelming users.
Used RAG to keep questions aligned with real learning goals while staying concise.
Added validation and fallback layers so AI outputs stay reliable and user-friendly.
Designed a minimal, calm UI that reduces cognitive load during study sessions.

🏗️ How We Built It

1. Pairing and matching

We built a pairing system that:

Stores each user’s courses and interests
Computes a similarity score based on shared courses and overlapping interests
Creates a Pair with two users and shared streak data and other attributes.

This means students are matched with someone who is actually relevant to their academic context and interests, not just a random user online.

2. Daily shared challenge

Each pair gets:

One daily multiple choice question that makes them apply their higher order thinking skills
Both partners answer it
Their streak increases when they both participate

This daily task is intentionally. We focus on a simple behavior: show up every day and try, while being positively reinforced to complete your task to maintain the streak.

3. AI assisted learning

For AI Mode, we:

Use a learning goals file for each course and week
Use an ensemble selector (classifier, embeddings, and keyword overlap) to pick a suitable learning goal
Ask an LLM to generate a question that fits that goal using RAG
Validate the result into a strict JSON format before storing it

When AI Mode is off, questions come from a curated LeetCode style pool to give CS kids the extra motivation they need for solving leetcode questions. This keeps the system flexible and safe.

4. Frontend experience

The frontend focuses on clarity and low friction:

A clean dashboard that shows your partner, streak, and AI Mode.
Card based answer choices that feel friendly and simple on both desktop and laptop screens

The goal was to make the app feel like a gentle daily ritual, not another stressful dashboard.

⚠️ Challenges We Faced

Balancing social good and scope

We had to continuously ask: are we building features that look impressive, or features that actually help students feel less alone?

AI reliability

Working with LLMs introduced challenges:

We needed prompts that gave questions that were challenging but still clear for students.

Designing for equity

We wanted PairUp to work even for students who:

Do not already have strong study groups
May be new to the language of instruction
Are coming from very different educational backgrounds

This meant focusing on gentle onboarding, clear questions, and minimal assumptions about prior support.

✨ Our Vision

Over time, a product like PairUp could:

Improve course completion for at risk students
Help international and transfer students integrate more smoothly
Turn daily practice into something collaborative, not lonely

We see PairUp as a step toward:

Campuses where students feel less isolated in their learning
Study habits that are built through encouragement, not guilt
A world where educational tools care about community and well being, not just performance