MyStudyPal

NOTE: MyStudyPal isn't a finished application. Expect unfinished features and bugs. If you find a bug or want to add/finish a feature, feel free to look at how to contribute to this project.

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MyStudyPal is an AI-powered study platform that turns learning materials into useful study tools.
Upload notes or textbooks, generate flashcards and quizzes, and track progress as you study.

Create a study set --> upload your documents --> create flashcards and quizzes!

What it does

• Generates flashcards and quizzes from uploaded documents
• Supports topic-focused generation (not just whole-document output)
• Tracks study progress over time
• Includes secure auth (email/password + Google OAuth)

Tech stack

Frontend

• Next.js
• React
• TypeScript
• Tailwind CSS

Backend

• Java 21
• Spring Boot
• Spring Security + JWT
• PostgreSQL
• Google GenAI (Gemini)
• Apache PDFBox

A quick note on RAG

MyStudyPal uses Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to improve output quality and reduce token usage.

At a high level:

1. A PDF is uploaded and text is extracted.
2. The text is split into chunks with overlap to preserve context.
3. Chunks are embedded into vectors.
4. The most relevant chunks are retrieved for a given prompt.
5. Gemini generates flashcards/quizzes using only relevant context.

This helps reduce hallucinations and keeps generation grounded in the user’s material.

Running locally

The .env.example files and application-example.yaml file shows how environment variables should be structured.

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From the project root:

make dev

Or run services separately:

make be   # backend
make fe   # frontend

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Bug fixes, UX improvements, and new features are all appreciated. Feel free to clone the project and open PRs.

IMPORTANT: If you open a PR, keep changes focused and include a short description of what you added/changed and your approach. If possible, also add images of what you changed.

If you want a place to start, here are good first ideas:

• Be able to upload multiple file types other than just .pdf
• Make quizzes and flashcard sets shareable between users
• Add support for user-provided API keys (so users can bring their own Gemini key)
• Add support for different AI providers to be used instead of just Gemini
• Make backend AI stuff async for better UX
• Extend the tracking and stats for quizzes and flashcards so that users can better see their improvement over time
• Be able to generate quizzes based on a flashcard set
• Be able to use the same document across multiple study sets instead of needing to reupload the same one multiple times
• Be able to create a flashcard set on a particular document, using the entire document as context rather than using RAG
• Be able to visually choose which question types you want in the quiz
• Be able to only view starred/unreviewed flashcards
• Be able to bulk generate flashcards and quiz questions using AI after a quiz/flashcard set has been created
• Improve generated quiz variety (difficulty levels, question types)
• Better optimization across the frontend and backend
• Improve accessibility, design, keyboard navigation, etc across the UI