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Welcome Page
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Questions for Harry Potter
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Results
Inspiration
After exploring Tech Optimum's online resources for frontend development, we are inspired to create an educational project that benefitted similarly to these online resources. Instead of focusing on the specialized field of web development, we are eager to benefit a more general group of people who face a common issue in the education field. Thus, as students, we understood that English studies is a commonly difficult subject with limited literature resources online for individuals of all ages. This led us to come up with a goal to create a convenient resource to practice and improve reading skills, PagePal.
What it does
PagePal is an educational platform designed to enhance reading comprehension in various works of English literature. The user inputs an English book into PagePal and it'll generate relevant questions for any chapter of a book of the user's choice which the user can answer and review their results. For instance, you can review your understanding of Chapter 5 of “The Great Gatsby” by going through PagePal’s tailored prompts. Then, the user will see the questions they got right and wrong after completing the assessments. After repeating through multiple chapters, PagePal aims to refine the user’s overall understanding of a particular book.
How we built it
PagePal uses Flask (Python) for the backend, utilizing our custom web scraper and the OpenAI API. This is paired with React, Vite, Node.js, and Tailwind CSS on the frontend side to structure and style our website. We also used Git and Github for version control and Figma to create some visual elements on our platform.
Challenges we ran into
At first, we struggled to integrate the backend with the frontend. There were many unprecedented errors we experienced that we resolved such as scraping raw HTML and errors in implementing the OpenAI API properly.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were able to produce a professional product and work towards a common passion despite having some challenges in communication at the start of the hackathon. In the end, we worked with our differences, collaborated as an unfamiliar team, and were very satisfied with the end product we put out.
What we learned
In this project, we learned how to work around API throttling, build a custom web scraper, and handle unique errors that we encountered from the responses we got from the AI. We also improved our proficiency in React with the help of the Tech Optimum mentors and their online resources.
What's next for PagePal
We're looking to improve PagePal user-friendliness by creating unique search options for different types of books, such as Shakespearean works, English novels, and poems. We also want to hone in on implementing accessibility features such as text-to-speech, night and colourblind mode, and resizable text to maintain user diversity.
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