A project made for Cal Hacks 11.0 by Jaden Johnson, Krish Garg, Quillan Gee, and Greg Chinnici
Link to Devpost submission: Gradify
Struggling with a STEM course? Didn’t ace that last exam? You’re not alone—and that’s exactly what Gradify is here to show you. Gradify is a platform designed to destigmatize academic struggles in STEM fields and help students see that one bad grade isn’t the end of the road. Instead, it’s part of a shared experience that many go through.
Gradify creates a safe, anonymous space where students can openly share their academic challenges without fear of judgment. By normalizing the ups and downs of learning, the app turns setbacks into opportunities. When users post about their difficulties, they’re rewarded with personalized AI feedback, including:
Actionable advice on how to improve, Tailored personal project ideas to strengthen weak areas, Curated resources to help them bounce back and excel. This isn’t just about comparison or competition—it’s about destressing through community. You’ll see that others are going through similar struggles, and by facing these challenges together, Gradify makes learning in STEM fields feel fun and encouraging rather than intimidating. The more you share, the more you can grow—and all with the support of people just like you.
We all empathize with the feeling of falling behind academically and that maybe our STEM major isn't for us. We wanted to have a platform where we could destigmatize that notion and create a safe and laid-back space for people to realize that they aren't by themselves and there are so many ways that they can improve academically both inside and outside the classroom.
Boosts the self-esteem of the user by creating a community that is transparent about the stresses of academics, especially in STEM fields where that transparency is uncommon.
We used Javascript, HTML, and CSS, to create a web application for the user. We used tools like Figma and Lucid to outline how we wanted to build our site, and to better our understanding of how we want our user to interact with our site.
Getting the application to work on a website. Our group isn't super experienced in web development or mobile development, so getting an environment set up where we could successfully start developing caused some troubles.
Figuring out a feedback loop to keep the users engaged was hard.
Creatively tackling a universal problem that we don't think is addressed very often. We are also happy that we made a decent working prototype of our web application, given our low experience.
We learned a lot about web development, and how we can learn tools like express.js and node.js.
We learned a lot about what keeps users engaged and what keeps them using the app for prolonged periods of time. We spent a lot of time studying other social media and what makes them popular. We also learned a lot on the structure of basic social media websites and how each particularly part part plays a role in the user experience. Through studying all of these, we learned how we could make our platform unique.
We wanted to extend Gradify out of the STEM world, and into just a world of "general stressors". We think that the world we live in now is, and for good reason, scared to share their flaws because of how they want to hold their self image. By using our app, we think that this will help create a better environment, not only in just STEM, but for people to be transparent about all issues.
We would also like to further modularize our project so that we can implement React into Gradify. As of now it is just JS, HTML, CSS, but we would like to use React to make everything much cleaner and more scalable
PostgreSQL, Express.js, React.js, Node.js, Groq-api