Academic Ally
An agentic study platform: students upload course syllabi and it auto-plans their semester, with built-in focus sessions and integrated task and project management. Powered our Round 1 submission into the top 10 of the KPMG Academic Innovation Challenge.
- Next.js
- React
- Cloudflare D1
- Cloudflare R2
Problem
Students start every semester re-deriving the same plan by hand: reading each syllabus, mapping deadlines to a calendar, and stitching together separate apps for tasks, focus, and project tracking. The setup cost is high and the plan goes stale the moment a course changes.
Approach
Academic Ally turns a syllabus into a semester. Students upload their course outlines and an agentic system extracts milestones, deadlines, and workload, then generates a plan with built-in focus sessions and integrated task and project management — so planning, doing, and tracking live in one place instead of three.
Technical Decisions
Syllabus parsing as the core primitive
We treated the uploaded syllabus as the single source of truth — files land in Cloudflare R2, structured plan data in D1 — so every downstream feature (focus sessions, tasks, projects) derives from one parsed representation rather than asking the student to re-enter their schedule.
Cloudflare-native data + storage
Built on Cloudflare D1 and R2 to keep the whole stack on one edge platform, which kept latency low and let a small team ship a working end-to-end submission inside the challenge timeline.
Tradeoffs
Auto-planning vs. student control
Auto-generating the plan removes setup friction but risks over-prescribing. We leaned toward an editable generated plan so students keep the final say rather than fighting a rigid schedule.
Breadth of integrated features under a deadline
Bundling planning, focus, and task management into one Round 1 submission meant each surface was intentionally lightweight. It proved the concept top-10, but depth on any single surface was deferred.
What I learned
- 01
Anchoring an app on one parsed primitive keeps every feature consistent and the scope honest.
- 02
A Cloudflare-native stack (D1 + R2) is a fast path to a working end-to-end demo.
- 03
Generated plans land better when the user can still edit them.