Educational articles with questions have been a standard for improving and testing reading comprehension abilities in students. Whether it's a Newsela article or the SAT Reading & Writing test, it's clear that this method is well-integrated into schooling systems across the world.
However, encouraging students to improve their reading comprehension with an uninteresting article is extremely hard for teachers. Students want to read about topics they are passionate about or curious about, which will not only keep them more interested but will motivate them to read the article closely and improve their skills.
PerplexPal is a web application delivering personalized, reliable articles for students using Perplexity's Sonar API. PerplexPal also generates questions based on the article to test students' reading comprehension. In addition, PerplexPal is customizable; to accommodate a wide range of students, PerplexPal can use the student's Lexile level to change the difficulty of the article and generate a custom number of questions.
PerplexPal is built with the following:
- The Sonar API, by Perplexity
- Node.js
- Vue.js
- TailwindCSS
- jsPDF
- Marked JS
- Google Fonts, Axios HTTP, GitHub, and more.
Building PerplexPal was incredibly rewarding. I worked with Perplexity's Sonar API to supercharge PerplexPal, providing reliable and speedy generation with an API that was simple to learn and implement. I gained a lot of experience in a range of frameworks and programming languages, including Vue.js and TailwindCSS. I learned how to use Marked JS to render Markdown and jsPDF to create dynamic, exportable PDFs. I also enhanced my skills in building Node.js applications and web development as a whole.
I'm excited for the future of PerplexPal- in a field where reading comprehension is unengaging and at times ineffective, PerplexPal has the opportunity to bring passion and joy to school assignments across the world. In the near future, I aim to complete the following:
- Build a Learning Management System (LMS) around PerplexPal. Login systems for admins, teachers, and students- imagine teachers assigning an article a night of the student's choice. Students get to choose the topic they read about, and teachers get feedback on how their students are developing their skills.
- Add AI-generated images, diagrams, and more to PerplexPal articles. In an age where the boundaries of generative AI for visuals are expanded every month, I believe that engaging students with AI-generated images and diagrams that support the article can help students improve their comprehension skills with visuals.
- Increase adoption of PerplexPal in schools. With some finishing touches, PerplexPal can be a disruptor in platforms for improving reading comprehension, dominated by Newsela, ReadTheory, and CommonLit.
- Expanding to foreign languages. PerplexPal can generate articles in foreign languages to help students across the world with reading comprehension in their native language.