Teo Mendoza

Overview

Pedalogical is an NSF-funded, full-stack educational platform that gives students personalized feedback within limits set by their instructor. It ran in a Spring 2026 university study with 150 students and has since been taken down, as it was built for the study.

Technical Overview

A full-stack web application with an ASP.NET backend and a PostgreSQL database.

• Backend and data: ASP.NET with EF Core over PostgreSQL, redesigned for classroom-scale deployment
• CI/CD: a pipeline with unit tests that gates every production release on a passing build
• Feedback pipeline: rolling student profiles replace full student histories in prompts, keeping feedback consistent over long interactions and cutting LLM tokens per call by an estimated 25%

My Role: Project Manager & Lead Developer

• Led a three-person student team on an NSF-funded initiative, running Agile sprints and milestones and acting as liaison to the faculty project lead
• Oversaw system design across the stack, including the redesigns for classroom-scale deployment
• Wrote 80% of the code for the Spring 2026 version, across the backend, database and client
• Championed the CI/CD pipeline and designed the profile-based feedback pipeline

Paper

Mendoza, T., et al. (2025). Not All Chatbots Teach: Evidence for Pedagogical Design in AI-Assisted Technical Education. ACM SIGCITE 2025.

The paper reports on the Spring 2025 study, which ran on an earlier prototype backend I built as a research assistant.

Read the Paper