Inspiration
We're first-years, and honestly our days are a mess. One deadline is in a WhatsApp group, another is on the LMS, and a third was mentioned once in class and then forgotten. Our timetable is a PDF that tells us which class is next but not what to do with the free hour before it. And during our first few weeks, a lot of us were lost on campus, asking random seniors where D-102 was.
We kept thinking that all of this should live in one place. So we built it.
What it does
CampusScope answers the two questions we ask ourselves all day: "What should I do next?" and "Where do I need to go?"
On the workspace side, you add tasks just by typing them like a normal message, something like "AI lab report due friday 5pm in D-102, urgent", and it figures out the course, the deadline, the room and how urgent it is. If an assignment feels too big, one click breaks it into small steps with a time estimate. Another click plans your day by fitting your work into the gaps between classes.
On the navigator side, you ask something like "how do I get to D-102?" and it shows you the shortest walking route on the campus map, along with how long it'll take and step-by-step directions. There's also an SOS button for emergencies.
The two halves talk to each other. If a task has a room, there's a Navigate button that takes you straight there.
We also made the whole thing feel like a game, because let's be honest, that's what actually gets us to open an app. Assignments are quests, finishing them gives you XP and levels, overdue work turns into a boss fight, and exploring new places on campus earns you badges. There are level-up screens, combo counters and little retro sound effects too.
How we built it
We used Gemma 4 for the part it's genuinely good at: understanding what a student types. It reads messy sentences and turns them into clean information, like a due date, a room, a list of steps or the place you're trying to reach. But we never let it decide the facts. The routes, the times and the day plan are all calculated by our own code from real campus data, and every answer Gemma gives is checked before it's shown. If Gemma isn't available, simpler rule-based logic takes over, so the app still works offline.
Gemma 4 runs right on a laptop through Ollama, or through Google AI Studio.
The backend is plain Python with SQLite. The frontend is plain JavaScript with Leaflet for the map. The routing uses Dijkstra's algorithm on a map of our campus that we put together ourselves. We split the work four ways: two of us on the backends and two on the frontends. Everyone worked in parallel and we merged everything on GitHub.
Challenges we ran into
The biggest one was stopping the AI from making things up. Language models will confidently invent a room number or a date, so we spent a lot of time making Gemma answer in a strict format and checking every piece against real data.
We also couldn't install packages the usual way in our setup, so we rebuilt part of the frontend without any frameworks.
Getting the frontends to talk to the backends when only one port was open took some figuring out.
And merging four people's work in a single day without stepping on each other's code was a challenge of its own.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Gemma isn't just a chatbot stuck in a corner of our app. It's woven into five real features. The app still works even with no internet and no AI running. And when we tested it on our friends, they actually wanted to finish their quests to level up, which we're counting as a win.
What we learned
We learned that the best way to use an AI model is to let it understand people while your own code handles the facts. We learned a lot about writing prompts that give clean, structured answers. And we learned that a little game design goes a long way in making boring things fun.
What's next for CampusScope
We want to pull deadlines in automatically from the LMS, add indoor directions floor by floor, send reminders before each class, and bring it to the other Amrita campuses.
Built with
gemma-4, ollama, google-ai-studio, python, sqlite, javascript, leaflet, html, css
Try it out
https://github.com/ashflamer/Campus-Copilot
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