Meet Jack, the Newcastle student who built an AI-powered solution to uni revision

For Jack Braddock, the problem with university wasn’t necessarily understanding the lectures, it was finding the time to do anything with them.

The second year electrical engineering student said: “I was spending so much time rewriting lecture notes and making flashcards that I wasn’t really learning anything.”

The frustration prompted Jack to develop Corvo, an AI-powered study platform designed to automate much of the administrative work involved in university revision. With that time freed up, he said, “I’m now learning more because I’ve got more time to test myself.”

Launched towards the end of his first year, Corvo has several hundred active users, with students registered across 70 different universities.

It connects with university learning management systems, including Canvas, Moodle, and Blackboard, automatically synchronising lecture materials every four hours. Students can also manually trigger a synchronisation whenever they need to access new content.

From there, the platform generates revision notes, flashcards, and quizzes, alongside tools to help students approach their academic work. Its flashcard interface is designed to be particularly accessible, with a scrolling experience reminiscent of TikTok and options for students to customise their revision into any colour.

Finding solutions 

The idea was not initially driven by the prospect of making money. Rather, Jack wanted to find out whether other students shared his frustrations. He initially tested the platform with his first year flatmates, including a biomedical sciences student who used Corvo-prepared flashcards to prepare for her end of year exams. 

“She said they were really helpful and that it actually worked for her,” he recalled. “Seeing it work for students beyond my own degree convinced me it could address a much wider problem.”

Jack’s experience of coding began well before Corvo. He had experimented with building websites and smaller side projects earlier on, but first became interested in the possibilities of AI when he used it to redesign the outdated website for his mother’s sock company.

The project became an opportunity to learn how to use AI to build functional websites, as well as understand the technical processes behind deploying them, managing their backends and ensuring they ran efficiently. Those skills proved invaluable when he eventually came to build Corvo.

“Because I’d learnt all those things beforehand, it took me about a week to make Corvo,” he said. “AI made things unbelievably easier.”

Would Corvo do the work for you?

Despite the growing number of AI tools available to students, Jack is keen to distinguish Corvo from platforms that risk doing academic work on behalf of their users: “Every feature’s been tested to make sure the platform remains a learning tool, rather than a shortcut around independent study.

“Corvo won’t graded answers or essays for you, and it won’t provide students with completed answers to tutorial questions.”

Instead, it aims to direct students towards examples and different approaches to solving problems.

“It’s a learning tool to make things easier, but it won’t do it for you,” he explained.

Corvo released a new feature recently that “takes you through your lecture with examples and different types of questions, which is a more interactive experience than being sat in a lecture not understanding anything.”

When asked whether it could mean students don’t actually attend their lectures, Jack said: “My view is you should be going. Lectures from home don’t have the same learning effect – the feature is there if you missed it, need walking through it for revision, or just need a 1:1 after when you can’t get in contact with the lecturer.”

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Jack also sees automatic integration as one of Corvo’s main advantages over competitors such as Claude and Google’s NotebookLM. While students can use those platforms to summarise lecture materials and generate revision resources, they generally have to upload their documents manually.

With Corvo, lecture materials are synchronised automatically, reducing the need for students to repeatedly download and upload files. He believes this student-centred approach is important to the platform’s identity, describing Corvo as “engineered personally for students.”

Although initially conceived with STEM students in mind, the platform has attracted users across a range of disciplines, with around 20 per cent studying humanities and law.

Much of its growth has come through social media, particularly TikTok, rather than traditional word-of-mouth marketing. Jack has used the platform to demonstrate Corvo’s features and reach students who might otherwise never have encountered it. He hopes to build on this through university societies, posters, and potential partnerships.

‘Bad feedback is more useful than good feedback’

For Jack, however, the most rewarding part of running Corvo has been hearing from people he has never met.

He said: “One of the best feelings is showing Corvo to someone and knowing that it’s actually helping them Bad feedback is more useful than good feedback.”

He particularly values unsolicited feedback from students who have discovered the platform independently, as it reassures him that Corvo is addressing a genuine need rather than simply solving a problem he had assumed everyone shared.

Running a start-up alongside a full-time degree has also given Jack an insight into areas of business beyond engineering, from marketing to human resources.

“I haven’t had to sacrifice much of my uni life, mostly because AI has made identifying and fixing technical issues, like bugs, considerably easier.”

Outside his studies and Corvo, Jack is an enthusiastic wingfoiler, a watersport combining elements of surfing and windsurfing. Having started around five years ago, he has begun taking the sport more seriously and hopes to compete on a world tour next year. He also plays for Newcastle University’s men’s hockey team.

In fact, one of the most significant changes Corvo has brought to his own life is the time to pursue interests beyond his degree.

“If Corvo didn’t exist, I definitely wouldn’t be out on a Wednesday night,” he said. “I’d be behind with my work because I’d be spending so much time handwriting notes. I probably wouldn’t have much of a social life.”

Instead, having more time to revise has allowed him to say yes to social plans while continuing to pursue his interests outside university.

Looking ahead, Jack wants Corvo to become a recognised software across universities, with the ambition of eventually reaching every university student. He also sees potential applications beyond higher education, including helping people prepare for their driving theory tests.

“If you make a start-up, obviously you want to make money,” he said. “But for me, it was much more personal. I wanted to help people and save them time.”

For now, Jack’s ambition is to keep expanding the platform while continuing his own uni experience. If Corvo succeeds, perhaps the measure of its success will be less about how many hours students spend on it, and more about how many they get back.

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