agucova / psuprep

:closed_book: A dynamic summary generator for the Chilean national math admissions test (PSU/PDT).

Introduction - CS50's Final Project

PSUPrep is a dynamic summary generator for the math university admission test in Chile (Prueba de Selección Universitaria or "PSU").

The webapp allows students to generate on request a cheat sheet with their selected contents, this way they can easily print a small high-quality study aid (conventional cheat sheets for the test usually have around 20 pages).

This attempts to address the problem of poor access to preparatory materials for the test, which has resulted in extremely skewed results towards high-income test-takers, the idea, then, is to give full access to open-source, customizable and high quality prep material.

Architecture

Heroku hosts a web runner and a Redis database with a full TeXLive installation.

When a request is made, Gunicorn acts as the HTTPS server and forwards requests, through WSGI, to Flask. When a compile request is made, Flask creates a task in the queue (huey, using Redis) which starts PDFLaTeX compilation through dynamic import of sections. Finally, the resulting PDF is sent to the user.

For the future

At this moment the platform only supports PDF output, but I'm working on an experimental branch with a completely new generator engine using Pandoc, which would be able to output simple HTML instead. I also plan to add a file cache and use Markdown for input, in order to enable easier contributions.