Study Planner

Framing the Problem

What is the problem you are trying to solve? Who does it affect?

College students often struggle with juggling quizzes, tests, and exams from a number of classes,
and sometimes find themselves unable to effectively prepare for all of them together. As college
students ourselves, we dealt with this problem first hand and wanted to create a better framework for
learning.

Idea Explanation

What is your idea? How does it fix the problem?

We know that the best way to commit information to long-term memory is through
spaced-repetition, so we designed Exam Exterminator to plan out studying schedules for the student.
All they have to do is input their exam name, key topics on the exam, and date, and the website
creates an interactive schedule for them showing them what to study on what day. The benefit to this
when compared to more traditional methods like cramming the day before a test is that it allows the
student to not have to study that long, since study sessions are spaced out and this way they can cover
multiple topics in a day without burning themselves out. With time and consistency, spaced repetition
does it's thing, and this will help students stay on top of their exam game with much less stress and
worrying.

Implementation

How do all the pieces fit together? Does your frontend make requests to your backend? Where does your database fit in?

This is a frontend-only React + TypeScript app running in the browser via Vite, with no backend,
server, API, or database. Data is stored in in-memory React state using useQuizManager and disappears
upon refresh. The AIService provides client-side logic to analyze quiz dates and topics, generating
a 7–14 day study plan and recommendations without making AI API calls. The app flow involves adding
quizzes via QuizForm, storing them in state, triggering useEffect to call AIService, and rendering
the schedule in CalendarView and RecommendationsView.

Challenges

What did you struggle with? How did you overcome it?

We had many challenges with the implementation of our code, and often found ourselves caught
up on unorganized and cluttered code. We talked to outher teams and we asked for help to understand
where some of our shotcomings regarding our implementation were, and through time we were able to fix 
these issues for the code to run properly. Additionally, we found ourselves lost in our code because we
did not describe what each section of the code was. This led to miscommuncation amongst ourselves and
our visions seemed to be a little different. However, we started to communicate more and dedicated 
more time to backtrack and describe our code. Although we had to spend valuable time on this, it 
limited our miscommuncation and allowed us to understand one another's code better.

Accomplishments

What did you learn? What did you accomplish?

We learned that we have a lot more to learn when it comes to web-development, as this was our first
time working on a project like this. We learned a little bit of React and this has pushed us to try
and further learn the MERN stack to really hone our full-stack development skills.

Next Steps

What are the next steps for your project? How can you improve it?

The next steps for our project are to expand to incorpate various courses and subjects to widen the 
impact of our app to students. Currently, our application is best suited for general classes without
much variety. Moving forward we will look to improve upon this and better generate practice test 
qustions to supplement their study schedule.