Wildernotes

Plant notes on any web page and watch them grow into a wild notebook.

Wildernotes: HackRU F2026 Winner for UI/UX and Education Digital notetaking is often very dull, and we wanted to make something fun, along with great QOL features that we would actually use. The notes are plants, they grow into trees, related ideas are joined by roots, and a frog quizzes you. You can also add animal markers to make your space feel more alive. The extension is also built on well researched learning strategies like active recall and connecting ideas through nodes. It makes research more fun and accessible as well, for people who might have trouble focusing. What It Does: Wildernotes is a Chrome extension for annotating any web page or PDF, then turning those notes into something you can study. On Any Page: Pick a sprite from the toolbar (sprout, mushroom, flower, cat, owl, rock, house, grass and more) and either drag over text to highlight it in that sprite's color, or click anywhere to plant the sprite right there. Each sprite can carry your own short note. Everything is saved to that page and comes back when you visit again, in the same spot, even after the page resizes or reflows. A scroll rail on the left edge shows every seed on the page. Click one to jump there; a small animal marks where you came from so you can jump back. Lily pads mark text you want to be quizzed on. Now and then a frog hops onto one and sits there. Apples are for active recall: plant one on a sentence, and a few minutes later (5 by default, 30 seconds for a demo) it grows into an apple tree and a pop-up asks you to fill in the blank from the paragraph you planted it in. PDFs open in our own PDF viewer, so you can annotate them like any other page. Keyboard shortcuts (1–0 for sprites, Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Shift+Z for undo/redo, - and + for sprite size) that never interfere when you are typing on a site. In the forest viewer Notes are grouped into forests (projects), shown as a grid you can arrange. Each forest is a list of seeds by page, and an Obsidian-style graph where every seed is a sprite node. Pages with two or more seeds get a large tree that gathers them. Shift-click two nodes to draw a root between them; hover a node to light up its neighbors. Lily pad quiz: Gemini or Cerebras writes multiple-choice questions from your lily pads (one request per quiz). Without a key or offline, it falls back to fill-in-the-blank questions made on the device. A frog hops from pad to pad as you answer. Grow from link: paste a URL, Gemini or Cerebras picks its 3–6 key ideas as exact quotes, plants them as seeds and grows roots to related seeds already in your forest, with a reason for each. Summarize & export: Gemini or Cerebras writes a study guide from a forest, which you can download as PDF or DOCX, or even a JSON to reupload notes across accounts/devices Four themes (Vibrant Jungle, Night Forest, Light Forest, and a plain Minimal theme that swaps the nature words and art for shapes and normal language). No account, no server: everything is stored locally in the browser, and AI is only called when you press a button, with your own Gemini or Cerebras key.