EducaThor

Sleak, modern landing page
Mindmap generated from 20C professor hand-written notes`
Text summary of the content given after the mindmap

Inspiration

We’ve all struggled with inefficient studying - toggling between platforms, drowning in unorganized notes, and getting stuck on homework questions without real help. We wanted to build a centralized, intelligent assistant that doesn’t just give answers, but actually helps students learn smarter.

What it does

EducaThor is a powerful suite of AI-powered tools designed to elevate how students learn:

TuzzAI (Chrome Extension): Interacts with questions on educational sites like Pearson or MacMillan. It explains high-level concepts, clears doubts, and provides hints - but never, EVER, the direct answer.
MindMapper: Converts handwritten notes and chaotic ideas into clean, customizable mind maps or text summaries using AI image processing.
CheatSheet AI: Accepts raw notes, PDFs, or lecture transcripts and distills them into downloadable, space-optimized cheat sheets.

All tools are unified through the EducaThor Hub, a secure web app that manages authentication, session sync, and access control.

How we built it

Frontend - React.js with TailwindCSS for styling, deployed via Netlify Backend - Node.js + Express.js, deployed via Render Chrome Extension: React.js with content + background scripts AI Integration: Gemini Database: Mongo Atlas + Firebase for cloud storage Authentication: Auth0

Challenges we ran into

Sharing and persisting one authentication system between the web app and the Chrome extension was particularly difficult since we need to send data across redirects between different API's
Getting the Chrome extension to take screenshots correctly
Getting the mindmap edges to show up in the downloaded file
Ensuring Gemini generates correct LaTeX syntax
Carefully engineering our system prompts so that the AI never gives out the actual answer
Turning Gemini generated LaTeX files into pdf's broke over and over again during deployment because it's impossible to get the native pdflatex program installed on cloud servers

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're using AI not to cheat, but to foster learning
An AI assistant that actually makes learning more efficient
Turning scribbled thoughts into mind maps that can be edited
Turning a bunch of notes into an organized cheatsheet written in LaTeX
Smooth token handoff between the web app and the Chrome extension
Interactive canvas

What we learned

How to make a chrome extension
How to share an authentication system between a web app and a chrome extension
How to make a Gemini wrapper
How to build fast, fail faster, and fix even faster under pressure

What's next for EducaThor

We want to make the experience of using these three tools more cohesive than ever. Rather than three distinct tools, we want to integrate them into one, seamless experience.

More ambitiously, we would like to expand EducaThor into a full-fledged futuristic learning platform that may someday replace traditional schools.