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Devansh
Devansh

Posted on AI-assisted

DeepCompass: The IIT Madras BS Degree AI Study Workbench

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Submission 🤝

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend

What I Built

I built DeepCompass for my friend and study partner Nitish, as well as our fellow peers enrolled in the IIT Madras BS Degree in Data Science & Applications,a rigorous degree program with thousands of students balancing demanding collegiate coursework, full-time jobs, and intense exam pressure.

The Problem My Friend Faced

In the IITM BS program, semester grading hinges on high-stakes in-person Computer-Based Tests (CBT) held in exam centers across India. Some subjects are specifically too hard to keep up with and students keep toggling between various Ai agents, notes and PYQ PDFs without actually gaining anything and without understanding the punitive exam mechanics:

  1. Severe Marking Traps: IITM multiple-choice questions are deliberately engineered with deceptively common pitfalls (e.g. forgetting the $W_O$ output projection matrix in Multi-Head Attention parameter counts, dividing by $\sqrt{d_{model}}$ instead of $\sqrt{d_k}$, or confusing a $1 \times 1$ spatial convolution with a single scalar weight).
  2. Dense 2-Hour Live Sessions: Teaching Assistants conduct 2-hour long YouTube live problem-solving sessions on digital chalkboards. It is very hard for students managing 2 degrees together to keep up with the long live sessions.
  3. Scattered Resources: Core reference resources are scattered across disparate Google Drive folders or random WhatsApp groups without syllabus-specific chapter roadmaps. I have seen a lot of people scrambling for resources like notes and pyqs, 1 day out from the exam.
  4. Generic AI Hallucinations: Closed, commercial chatbots fail to warn students about the exact multiple-choice, multiple select marking traps, and cannot synchronize with official IITM chalkboard sessions.

What DeepCompass Does

DeepCompass is an open-source, dual-mode academic workbench that unites these fragmented tools into a single, cohesive interface:

  • Interactive Past-Year Question (PYQ) Lab: 35 curated exam problems complete with KaTeX mathematical derivations, 30-second arithmetic shortcuts, and audio walkthroughs.
  • 364 CBT Exam Paper Digital Bank: 21 authentic past computer-based exam papers (from 2022 to 2026) digitised into an interactive, searchable archive filtered by mark weightage (1M, 2M, 3M, 4M+) and official answer keys.
  • Multi-Session Lecture Dissector: 5 authentic IIT Madras BS live sessions synchronized down to the exact second with chalkboard derivations, mathematical equations, and direct PYQ links.
  • Curriculum Google Drive PDF Hub: Direct integration with full-length textbook PDFs on Google Drive (Foundations of LLMs, NLP with Transformers, Mathematics for Machine Learning), paired with chapter-by-chapter breakdowns and exam traps.
  • Dual-Track Study Mode: Toggle between ** Quick Exam Prep** (rapid cram rules, trap warnings, and 30-second heuristics) and ** Deep Conceptual Explanation** (rigorous mathematical derivations and first-principles proofs).

👥 Who I Built This For: The "Build for a Friend" Story

In the early hours of 10th September, this year, I received a call from Nitish, a BS Degree batchmate and a great friend of mine. He was asking for study tips, exam resources and where to get started. It was unusual that questions pertaining to academics were coming from him - but 13th September was our End Term Exam ,so it made sense. I wondered what was he going to actually learn if he was getting started with his exam preparation just 3 days out from the exam but to his credit his university exams ended just a day earlier. In the IITM BS Degree, this is a par for the course and Nitish is actually a representative of the larger student community who are juggling 2 degees together or managing this degree alongside a job.

Although I suggested a roadmap for the exam preparation and referred some resources to him, including the live lecture recordings on youtube but I knew that he was so short on time that nothing is going to be enough - atleast for this exam, especially if he kept swinging between Chatgpt, live sessions and pyqs, without actually understanding anything!

Since then I have had the thought to develop something, that can bring all the resources to one place. Similar tools have existed before as well - but everything was scattered across various tools. So the novelty of DeepCompass is to bring everything together in an efficient way and the Live Session Dissector - so that students, short on time, watch only the necessary part of the lectures.

We needed an integrated single source of truth that respects our time and bridges the gap between video recordings, textbooks, and past-year exam questions and that is what DeepCompass aims to do.

PS: Nitish has DL Gen AI and Machine Learning Practice subjects this term. DeepCompass has these subjects covered. All the Best to him!🐱

🚀 Demo

💻 Code

The complete source code (Next.js 16 frontend, FastAPI backend, digitised CBT question datasets, and extraction tools) is open source:

GitHub logo 23f3003672 / decompass-iitm

IIT Madras BS AI Study Workbench with Gemma 2, KaTeX Math & CBT Exam Trap Detection

🎓 DeepCompass — The IIT Madras BS AI Study Workbench

Hacktoberfest 2026 Weekend Challenge 1: Build for a Friend
Built with Open-Source AI (Google Gemma 2) at its core, ElevenLabs audio, and Render cloud hosting.

Hacktoberfest Challenge Open Source AI Voice Deployment IIT Madras BS Degree

🌟 The Problem: Building for My Friend & Study Group

In the IIT Madras BS Degree in Data Science and Applications, thousands of students balance demanding jobs or dual degrees. Every semester before Quiz 1, Quiz 2, and End-Term exams, the same panic unfolds across WhatsApp and Telegram study groups:

  1. The 2-Hour Slog: Instructors and TAs record 120-minute live problem-solving sessions on YouTube. Students dread sitting through hours of audio buffering and chat chatter just to find the 10-minute segment where the TA solved Question #4 on the chalkboard.
  2. Scattered Resources: Formulas are in 700-page textbook PDFs (Ian Goodfellow, Jurafsky & Martin, Bishop), questions are buried in past-year PDFs (PYQs), and intuition…
View on GitHub

🛠️ How I Built It

DeepCompass was engineered as a high-performance, accessible web application with open-source AI at its foundation:

1. Open-Source AI Architecture (Gemma 2)

  • Powered by Google's open-weight Gemma 2 (gemma-2-9b-it), which excels at mathematical reasoning and step-by-step pedagogical explanations.
  • Designed a Dual-Pedagogy Prompting Engine:
    • Exam Cram Engine: Forces concise responses, high-impact bullet points, and explicit "⚠️ IITM Exam Trap" callouts.
    • Deep Concept Engine: Generates comprehensive first-principles proofs and LaTeX tensor formulations.
  • Includes a client-side curriculum intelligence fallback to guarantee zero latency and 100% offline availability during study sessions.

2. Full-Stack Tech Stack

  • Frontend: Next.js 16 (App Router with Turbopack), React 19, TypeScript.
  • Styling: Custom CSS design system inspired by dark luxury educational platforms (palette: Deep Obsidian #111111, Deep Teal #16303D, Aged Parchment #D6D3BA, Paper Cream #FFFAF8).
  • Mathematical Typesetting: KaTeX rendering for clean, pixel-perfect mathematical formulas without layout shift.
  • Accessible Audio Assistant: Browser Web Speech API enhanced with a custom LaTeX-to-Speech Sanitizer that converts complex symbols like $\frac{1}{\sqrt{d_k}}$, $\alpha$, and $\Delta W$ into natural spoken English instead of raw punctuation characters.
  • Backend: Python 3.12, FastAPI, Pydantic v2, HTTPX, and Uvicorn deployed on Render.

💡 Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

For a college student in India, closed proprietary AI models present massive roadblocks:

  1. Defeating the Academic Paywall (Zero Marginal Cost): Commercial subscription paywalls ($20/month, ~₹1,700/month) are unaffordable for many students. A 2-hour technical lecture transcript is over 20,000 words; processing multiple course recordings through closed token APIs would cost hundreds of dollars. With Google's open-weight Gemma 2, students and universities can run high-grade inference at $0 marginal cost.
  2. Offline Resilience for Commuters: Many IITM BS students study on local trains, buses, or in areas with intermittent connectivity. Open-weight models like Gemma 2 can run locally on consumer laptops with Ollama with zero internet connection.
  3. Data Sovereignty & Academic Integrity: Students shouldn't have to surrender their unpublished assignments, exam drafts, or private study doubts to closed corporate training datasets.
  4. Community Curriculum Freedom: Open innovation allows our student community to collaboratively expand DeepCompass to future semesters (Reinforcement Learning, Computer Vision, AI Search) without vendor lock-in.

🏆 Prize Categories

I am entering DeepCompass into the following official partner and challenge categories:

1. 🌟 Google DeepMind / Google AI (Gemma Category)

  • How it was used: DeepCompass is powered by Google's open-weight Gemma 2 (gemma-2-9b-it). Gemma 2 serves as the core academic tutor, utilizing a custom dual-pedagogy prompting architecture that toggles between fast heuristic cram rules and rigorous first-principles mathematical derivations with step-by-step LaTeX formulas and negative marking trap alerts.

2. 🚀 Render (Deployment Category)

  • How it was used: The entire DeepCompass Python FastAPI backend and dataset API are hosted and running live on Render (https://decompass-iitm.onrender.com). It continuously builds from our GitHub repository, serving live endpoints for authentic IITM exam papers, PYQ solutions, and dynamic AI queries with zero downtime.

3. 🎙️ ElevenLabs (Audio & Speech Category)

  • How it was used: Integrated ElevenLabs to power the AI Teaching Assistant voice player, converting dense mathematical derivations, formulas, and tricky CBT multiple-choice traps into 90-second spoken intuitions so students can listen and absorb concepts on the go.

4. 🏆 Build for a Friend (Grand Theme Category)

  • Who it was built for: Built for my friend and batchmate Rohan and fellow peers in the IIT Madras BS Degree in Data Science & Applications, saving them hours of scrubbing through 2-hour long YouTube live recordings and preventing costly -0.25 to -1.0 negative marks on high-stakes in-person computer-based exams.

💙 Conclusion

Building DeepCompass reinforced how open-source AI can transform education. Rather than locking advanced educational tooling behind subscription tiers, open weights allow developers to craft deeply personalized, community-first solutions that solve real, everyday struggles for friends and peers.

Happy Hacktoberfest! 🎃

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