Soumya ghosh

Posted on Oct 4 AI-assisted

SchoolDesk: AI-Powered Administration and Teaching Support for Schools

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Submission 🤝

title: SchoolDesk: AI-Powered Administration and Teaching Support for Schools
published:

tags: devchallenge, weekendchallenge, hf26challenge

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

What I Built

I built SchoolDesk, a dual-purpose administrative and academic web platform designed specifically for my father, who is a school principal.

Managing a government school in India involves immense bureaucratic overhead, particularly the daily accounting for the "Midday Meal" scheme (tracking rice consumption, expenses, and student attendance). My father and his staff were losing hours daily to manual paper ledgers. Furthermore, teachers were spending significant off-the-clock time developing chapter notes and complex whiteboard diagrams.

This platform solves both problems:

The Administrative Ledger: A voice-activated inventory tracker that takes natural language audio, transcribes it, and automatically structures it into a secure, downloadable, government-compliant Excel sheet and a generated "analog-style" handwritten digital ledger.
The Teaching Aid (Admin Notes): A client-side PDF scanner that ingests textbook chapters and uses a rigorously constrained LLM to output a master formula sheet, Higher-Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) questions, and dynamically generated SVG whiteboard diagrams.

Demo

school-desk-lime.vercel.app

video link:

hacktober1stchallenge.mp4 - Google Drive

drive.google.com

Code

SoumyaGhosh2006 / SchoolDesk

SchoolDesk

Dual-Purpose School Administrative Ledger & AI Pedagogical Assistant

📖 Overview

In government and public schools, headmasters, principals, and teachers face two recurring, time-consuming administrative challenges every single day:

Manual Mid-Day Meal (MDM) Ledger Bookkeeping: Manually recording daily student attendance, calculating ingredient costs (eggs, vegetables, oil, pulses, spices, fuel), reconciling bulk rice grain stocks, and maintaining flawless handwritten inspection registers for government compliance.
Time-Intensive Lesson Preparation: Extracting formulas, drafting Higher-Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) questions, synthesizing student mistake pitfalls, and drafting whiteboard diagrams across heavy textbook chapters.

SchoolDesk solves both problems with a unified, voice-driven digital workspace. It allows school staff to speak their daily meal expenses into existence in seconds, generate audit-ready spreadsheets and realistic handwritten registers, digitize physical vouchers with a built-in camera document scanner, and instantly convert syllabus PDFs into structured, textbook-grade teaching aids.

🚀 Core Features & Use Cases (User Guide)

SchoolDesk is designed to be completely…

View on GitHub

How I Built It

Tech Stack

Frontend: React, Vite, Tailwind CSS (Typography), remark-gfm / rehype-katex (for LaTeX rendering), html-to-image (for flawless PDF exports bypassing CSS color crashes).
Backend: FastAPI (Python), PyPDF2.
AI & Open Source: Meta's Llama 3 70B (via Groq for lightning-fast inference), OpenAI Whisper (for audio transcription).
AI Collaborators: Antigravity (coding agent), Gemini, and ChatGPT for architectural thought-partnering and prompt engineering.

System Architecture & Workflow

The application is built on two highly resilient, state-driven pipelines.

Pipeline 1: The Voice-to-Ledger Engine

[Voice Input]
     ↓
[Audio Sanitization / Base MIME Extraction]
     ↓
[Whisper API Transcription]
     ↓
[Raw Text]
     ↓
[LLM Data Extraction]
     ↓
[Strict Pydantic JSON Schema]
     ↓
[Frontend State Update]
     ↓
[Human Verification / Editing]
     ↓
[CSV or Handwritten Ledger Export]

Pipeline 2: The Pedagogical Teaching Aid Engine (Admin Notes)

[PDF/Image Upload]
     ↓
[Client-side jsPDF Scanner / PyPDF2 Extraction]
     ↓
[Raw Textbook Text]
     ↓
[LLM Inference (Llama 3 70B)]
     ├─> State 1: Zero Hallucination Grounding (Extracts exact formulas)
     ├─> State 2: 20% Prerequisite Memory Injection (Temperature = 0.2)
     ├─> State 3: Strict Escaping (Raw String Python Prompts)
     └─> State 4: SVG Generation (Forced Complexity Parameters)
     ↓
[Frontend Rendering]
     ├─> Sanitized GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM)
     ├─> KaTeX CSS for Textbook-Quality Equations
     └─> Tailwind Prose for Professional Typography
     ↓
[Google Docs Bridge / High-Res PDF Export]

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

Open innovation is the only way a project like this can exist in the real world. Closed, proprietary APIs are often too expensive, rigid, or heavily rate-limited for public sector education systems in developing nations. By utilizing open-weight models like Llama 3 and open-source audio transcription, we can achieve enterprise-grade automation on a shoestring budget.

The Real-World Impact & Metrics

Administrative Efficiency: What previously took 1.5 to 2 hours of manual calculation, cross-checking, and physical ledger entry is now accomplished via a 30-second voice note while walking down the school hallway. The data is instantly structured, mathematically verified, and ready for government audit.
Pedagogical Quality: Designing engaging, challenging lesson plans with accurate visual aids is time-consuming. The Teaching Aid module reduces a 3-hour lesson prep down to 15 seconds. By injecting "prerequisite formulas" and HOTS questions, it actively upgrades the quality of education delivered to the students.
Market Positioning: 95% of current EdTech focuses on the student (AI tutors, homework solvers). This project targets the administrators and teachers—a massive, underserved demographic that desperately needs tools to reduce burnout and administrative bloat.

Prize Categories

SchoolDesk currently uses open-source/open-weight AI and local inference, and using render.com to deploy my backend and to host the database,