Front-Row

Some students can't take their own notes. A broken arm, ADHD, low vision, a hand that cramps after ten minutes. For them, a lecture isn't something you can just sit through; it's something they'll have to rebuild later from whatever they can find. Schools try to help by asking a classmate to volunteer as a note-taker. Too often nobody says yes. At one U of T campus, more than 200 courses had no note-taker at all. When someone does volunteer, the notes arrive late, stop after a few weeks, or miss what was written on the board. That's where most of the lesson is. This started with a student in my own class who broke their arm and couldn't write a thing. I built Front Row so no student has to wait for a volunteer. They prop their phone facing the board and tap Record. Front Row listens to the professor and reads the board, and about a minute and a half after class it hands them a draft of real study notes: the formulas, the worked examples, the key terms, and every "this will be on the exam." Each section links to the board photo it came from. If it can't read something, it says so instead of guessing, because a wrong formula hurts a student more than a missing one. The notes are private to the student, export to PDF or Word, and work in university or high school. The goal is simple: whatever seat you're in and whatever you can or can't do with your hands, you leave class with the same notes as the best student in the room. Everything in the demo and the repo was built during the hackathon (Oct 26 to Nov 4). Front Row plugs into Cadenza, a study app I built before the event, for sign-in and storage; the README lists exactly which Cadenza pieces it uses, and none of Cadenza's code is in the repo.