coolcodersj / studentmate

An AI-based approach to remembering assignments.

StudentMate

An AI-based approach to remembering assignments.

What is StudentMate?

StudentMate is a to-do list platform that uses AI to automatically fetch assignments from my school district's LMS. It then notifies people of the assignments so that students don't need to remember to check teacher pages for assignments.

How does it work?

After setup, Studentmate scrapes our LMS (LMS will now be referred to as Blackboard, the name of the LMS.) using access it gains through a browser extension.

• StudentMate cycles through each teacher page and looks for an agenda in the format of a Google Slides slidedeck.
• It opens the slidedeck in a headless chromedriver instance, takes a screenshot, then runs it through OCR.
• It sends the text grabbed from the slidedeck to YouChat, a free alternative to ChatGPT, with a heavily customized prompt
• Finally, it reads YouChat's response and adds the assignments received to the database.
• When assignments are near due, StudentMate sends an email reminder, with an option to text reminders too.

Some Pictures

Run Locally

Note StudentMate is currently locked to North Allegheny Students only because it only works with how NA has Blackboard set up.

If you'd like to run your own instance of StudentMate and/or change how it works to use your LMS, follow le instructions below:

1. Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/CoolCoderSJ/StudentMate.git

2. Setup .env

To begin, copy .env.example to .env

Appwrite

The project uses Appwrite, so you will need to get an appwrite project set up. You can get private beta access to the cloud hosted instance @ https://appwrite.io/cloud, or host it yourself.

• Change line 21 in main.py and line 28 in utils.py to your appwrite instance url, and change line 22 in main.py and line 29 in utils.py to your appwrite project ID. Finally, set the environment variable APPWRITE_API_KEY to your Appwrite server API key in .env

Google Oauth

• Setup a new Google Developer Project @ http://console.cloud.google.com/
• Create Oauth2 Credentials for the project
• Set the GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID and GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET in .env to these credentials
• If you need more help creating these credentials, follow this tutorial: https://developers.google.com/workspace/guides/create-credentials

YouChat

• Get an API Key at https://api.betterapi.net/about/
• Fill out the api key as YOU_API_KEYin the .env

Email and SMS Notifications

To send email reminders, the project uses gmail SMTP. If you would like to use something else, you can configure the send_email function (View here) to use your SMTP settings and change line 331 of utils.py to use the send_email function instead.

If you would like to use Gmail SMTP, all you have to do is fill out EMAIL and EMAIL_PASSWORD in .env

SMS

To send emails StudentMate uses Gmail SMTP so that it uses my school email to bypass any district email filters. However, to text people, StudentMate uses Sendgrid (email-to-text) so that it can use the official email. If you are fine with Sendgrid, configure SENDGRID_EMAIL and SENDGRID_PASSWORD in the env file. Otherwise, configure the send_email function (View here) to use your SMTP settings instead.

Huggingface

StudentMate uses Sentence Transformers (all-MiniLM-L6-v2) to check for similar assignments so that duplicates aren't created. To connect to this model, you need a huggingface token. Add this token as HUGGINGFACE_TOKEN in the env.

Python

4. Install Python and its Requirements

• Make sure you have Python 3 installed.
• Install all dependencies by running

pip install -r requirements.txt

Run Server

6. Run the server using python main.py