KZ UniVerse
A single platform for Kazakhstan's universities
Problem
An applicant assembles a decision about a university from a dozen websites, rumours and outdated score tables. We took the part of the theme we know first-hand: how a school student from the regions picks a university.
Solution
A catalogue of universities and programmes, a side-by-side comparison of up to three of them on identical parameters, demand analytics, and a chat assistant that answers admissions questions — and keeps answering when the cloud model is unreachable.
Engineering decisions
- The assistant is a chain: a local model through Ollama, cloud Gemini, then built-in rules. No key or no internet — the chat still answers. At a pitch the venue Wi-Fi goes down exactly when you start the demo.
- The side effect turned out to matter more than the insurance: the platform can be stood up where cloud models are unavailable or barred by an institution's policy.
- The site and the Telegram bot work off the same data, so there is no second copy of the reference book to maintain.
What went wrong
- It is a reference book with a chat interface, not an adviser: current entry scores and the rules for a given year still have to be checked on the university's own site.
- 15 universities is not "all the universities of Kazakhstan". The base holds the largest ones; the rest are added by hand. Promising full coverage after 24 hours of work would have been a lie.
- 3D tours are a stated direction, not a finished feature: the section and the structure exist, the panoramas don't.
Result
In 24 hours the applicant's whole path was covered: catalogue, university page, comparison, analytics, a profile with a portfolio and a Telegram bot. The assistant answers in three modes, and none of them is required to run the project.
What I'd do differently
University data sits in JSON next to the code — over a 24-hour hackathon that was the difference between a working catalogue and configuring a database until morning. The price is honest: edits need a deploy and there is no admin panel. That's the first thing to replace if the project is to go on.
How it went
IT Fest 2025, Almaty, 5–6 December — one of Kazakhstan's largest youth festivals in digital and creative technology. Eight tracks, an alliance of universities (UIB, IITU, Astana IT University, KBTU) backed by the NNEF foundation and the Almaty city administration. We took the 24-hour Hackathon track: the theme is announced on the spot and by morning there has to be a working product, not slides.
