PlanPanda | Devpost

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Inspiration

As students, we noticed that our professors sometimes struggle to create lesson plans that are tailored and designed towards achieving learning outcomes. Our goal with this project was to help make the process of creating learning materials such as lecture slides and worksheets easy for professors. PlanPanda is a platform that is highly customizable and fully functional so that professors can turn ideas into realtime lesson plans.

What it does

PlanPanda is your powerful partner in planning. It is an application that allows professors to generate high quality lesson plans and lecture slides simply by inputing class name, lesson title, and description comments. As an added bonus, PlanPanda also generates professors worksheets consisting of one or more lessons.

How we built it

For the frontend, we used several tools, including TypeScript, React, React Router, shadcn, and Tailwind CSS. Each of these tools were chosen to let us iterate quickly, and experiment with new technology. On the backend, we used Hono, a Node.js framework, with a SQLite database to handle queries and store data from user input, and we used BetterAuth on both the frontend and backend to authenticate the user. To compile the LaTeX beamer source, and convert it to images that are used as previews, we used pdflatex, FastAPI, and Python. The OpenAI API is used to develop course content, including lecture slides and worksheets. Additionally, the frontend of our application is deployed on Vercel, while the Python microservice is deployed on a VPS using Docker.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we ran into was compiling the LaTex code into a format that is displayable and downloadable. However, as a team, we combatted this by developing programs to convert LaTex code into PDFS, which were then converted into Base64 strings. Beyond the technical aspect, there were many times as a team of 4 it was harder to navigate code revision. We were able to resolve this through clear communication.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our UI/UX design coming to life as we envisioned and for being able to deploy our web app successfully under tight time constraints. We are also happy to have been able to build our minimum viable product and focus on some of our stretch goals for the project. It is great to see that professors can also upload their own pre-existing course material and use that information to create even more tailored content.

What we learned

As a team, our knowledge on frontend and backend development has increased during the hackathon. Our frontend and backend required numerous components to integrate and function correctly. Our team also learned more about APIs and connecting AI APIs into applications.

What's next for PlanPanda

In the future, we would like to implement additional features such as detailed lesson plans and the option for professors to modify worksheets. We also plan on creating a student facing version of the product so that students can review lecture slides and submit worksheets online. In addition we want to design a way for students’ handwritten worksheets to be autograded within our web application.