This is your project. Right now it is close to empty, which is deliberate - what it becomes is up to you.
Over thirteen Fridays you are going to build an AI transport and timetable assistant: something a student can ask "what time is the last bus to Whitchurch" or "when does my Tuesday lecture start" and get a straight answer from.
You are working as junior consultants. College staff are the customer. That means you ask them what they need rather than guessing, you show them work in progress, and you change course when they tell you something you did not expect.
Fridays, 09:00 to 16:00, at Andover. Thirteen sessions, three phases. Half-term on 30 October is skipped. The final presentation is on 11 December.
| Phase | When | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Phase 1 - Research and design | Weeks 1-4, 11 Sep to 2 Oct | Work out who uses this, what they actually ask, and what a good answer looks like. Write it down before building anything. |
| Phase 2 - Build and test | Weeks 5-9, 9 Oct to 13 Nov | Configure the assistant, wire it into this site, and test it against the questions you gathered in Phase 1. |
| Phase 3 - Refine and present | Weeks 10-13, 20 Nov to 11 Dec | Fix what testing exposed, tidy the site, and present the finished thing to the college. |
One thing worth saying early: this is configuration first, not coding first. You are not expected to write an AI model. You are expected to set one up properly, connect it to real information, and judge whether its answers are any good. That judgement is the actual skill.
Clone the repository, then in a terminal in the project folder run npm install followed by npm run dev. Open the address it prints. You
should see this page.
Open src/pages/index.astro - this file - and change this
heading or any of this text. Save it. The browser updates on its own. That
loop is most of web development.
Push your change to GitHub. It deploys to the live site automatically, with no further action from you. Watch it happen, then find the deployed page and check your change is there.
Before next Friday, ask five people at the college a transport or timetable question they have actually needed answering. Write down their exact words, not your tidied-up version. Those words are your starting material for Phase 1.
| Where | What it is |
|---|---|
src/pages/ |
One file per page. A file called about.astro becomes the
page /about.
|
src/layouts/ | The shared page shell - the bits every page has in common. |
src/components/ | Reusable pieces. The assistant placeholder lives here. |
src/styles/global.css | All the styling. Plain CSS, no framework. |
public/ | Images, fonts, anything served as-is. |
Bottom right of this page there is a button that does nothing. That is
deliberate. It marks the spot where the real assistant gets mounted in
Phase 2, and the file behind it (src/components/AssistantPlaceholder.astro) explains what will replace it.
Leave it alone until Phase 1 is finished. Building the thing before you know what it needs to answer is the most common way projects like this go wrong.
Nothing here yet - this is the placeholder. Building it is your job in Phase 2.