An AI-based approach to remembering assignments.
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.
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.
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:
git clone https://github.com/CoolCoderSJ/StudentMate.gitTo begin, copy .env.example to .env
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.pyand line 28 inutils.pyto your appwrite instance url, and change line 22 inmain.pyand line 29 inutils.pyto your appwrite project ID. Finally, set the environment variable APPWRITE_API_KEY to your Appwrite server API key in.env
- Setup a new Google Developer Project @ http://console.cloud.google.com/
- Create Oauth2 Credentials for the project
- Set the
GOOGLE_CLIENT_IDandGOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRETin.envto these credentials - If you need more help creating these credentials, follow this tutorial: https://developers.google.com/workspace/guides/create-credentials
- Get an API Key at https://api.betterapi.net/about/
- Fill out the api key as
YOU_API_KEYin the.env
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
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.
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.
- Install Python and its Requirements
- Make sure you have Python 3 installed.
- Install all dependencies by running
pip install -r requirements.txt- Run the server using
python main.py