Canvas CoPilot
An AI-powered academic assistant that helps students manage and prioritize their coursework. Won 1st place at the University of Virginia Hackathon.
Canvas CoPilot connects a student’s Canvas account to a language model so that assignments, deadlines, and course material become something you can ask questions about, rather than something you have to dig through.
It won 1st place at the University of Virginia Hackathon.
What it does
Students authenticate once, and CoPilot pulls their courses, assignments, and due dates into a single view. From there it ranks daily academic tasks by urgency and workload, so the next thing to work on is always at the top.
How it works
- Data collection — web scraping scripts pull course content that the Canvas API doesn’t expose directly.
- ETL pipeline — an extract-transform-load pipeline moves data between Canvas and the application database, normalizing inconsistent course structures along the way.
- Assistant layer — the OpenAI API turns that structured data into prioritized, plain-language guidance.
Security
Because the system holds student academic records, encryption was part of the design rather than an afterthought: AES for data at rest in the database, and SSL/TLS for data in transit.