What is PPE?
Personal Planning Environment (PPE for short) is a tool made to more comprehensively understand the
information in curricula. The way it works is that you can upload the digital form online to the
tool and in turn it will put everything in a comprehensive list. If deadlines and prerequisites are
mentioned in the curriculum it will also take those into account and sort it in order from most
urgent to least urgent.
Everything that’s uploaded will be sorted into periods and classes so it can easily be revisited at a
later date, this is to make sure students can use PPE for multiple different subjects at once.
Why was PPE made?
The idea of PPE came to me out of a personal “itch” against complicated curricula and the confusion
they bring with them. This is a feeling many other students share, mostly students with learning
disabilities like myself.
I’ve visited multiple different schools in different parts of the academic journey, from high school
trough university and have spoken with the students. I’ve concluded that around 80% of students
don’t fully read or understand their curricula and have close calls or stressful experiences due to
this. Most of these students have some sort of learning disability like dyslexia, ADHD or a visual
impairment. The goal of PPE is to help not only these students but every student manage their tasks
better and give them a clearer idea of what is expected of them.
How is PPE made?
This project can be divided into three different parts, front-end, back-end and server hosting (since
I’m doing that myself). I’ve done research and I’ve come to the following development stack.
Front-end:
For the front-end I’m using React and Material UI. I’ve chosen React since its one of the more well
documented and reliable frameworks used for creating web applications. Material UI is a component
library specifically made for React with it’s main selling point being that its components follow
Google’s material design philosophy making it look like an application from the get go.
Back-end:
For the back-end I’m using Next.js, MongoDB and Google GenAI. Next.js is a server side runtime
environment built on Node.js which was made for React development, which is a perfect fit for the
front-end and because of its current relevancy. MongoDB is a formless database which was chosen for
its ease of use. Lastly Google GenAI is what reads and writes to the user, it was chosen for its
performance when dissecting documents, and its response time.
Server hosting:
PPE (and this site) are run on my personal VPS. This VPS runs on the Linux distro Ubuntu, which has
been the default for some time and is well documented. For webhosting specifically I use nginx for
its documentation and its flexibility.
