Up-Grade

Up-Grade turns your study materials into smart quizzes using Google Tesseract and Gemini—just snap, study, and score. Get instant feedback, track your performance, save your work, and more!

Comment

Inspiration

Studying can be overwhelming—especially when jumping between textbooks, notes, and online tools. We wanted a faster, smarter way to turn passive reading into active recall. Up-Grade was born out of a simple idea: what if you could take a screenshot of your study material and instantly turn it into a personalized quiz?

What it does

Up-Grade lets users snap a screenshot of study material like textbook pages or handwritten notes. Then, using Google Tesseract, it extracts the text. Alternatively, the user can input a PDF of the material for Gemini to generate custom quizzes with explanations and instant feedback. Users, are then given a set of curated flashcard after the quiz to cultivate active recall. Finally, if users choose to sign in, quiz history is given to review past quizzes.

How we built it

We used:

  • Google Tesseract OCR to extract text from images
  • Gemini (via Google AI APIs) to generate high-quality quiz questions and explanations
  • A frontend interface built with React, HTML, CSS, and Bootstrap
  • A backend for quiz history of users built with Firebase

Challenges we ran into

  • Implementing a cohesive design system across pages with CSS
  • Engineering the best way to call APIs to ensure consistent outputs
  • Designing a UI that was not only intuitive to tech-savvy learners, but new ones too
  • Initial authentication for Firebase, and the integration into our website.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Seamlessly integrated OCR and LLMs into a smooth user workflow
  • Built a tool that feels intuitive and genuinely helpful for any student
  • Generated quizzes that actually reinforce learning with accurate feedback
  • Created not only a working product, but polished for impeccable user experience

What we learned

  • How to combine OCR and generative AI to create adaptive learning tools
  • The importance of UX in education tech—making learning feel effortless
  • Real-world constraints of OCR and LLMs (messy inputs, prompt tuning, etc.)
  • How instant feedback improves retention and builds learner confidence

What's next for Up-Grade

  • Mobile app integration for even faster on-the-go quizzes
  • Support for more complex formats (tables, diagrams, math formulas)
  • Smarter quiz modes (true-false, flashcards, spaced repetition)
Share this project:

Updates