Beginner Looking for Advice

Hello, I am a current freshmen majoring in CS and looking to participate in a hackathon in a month (mostly for just fun and learning). My group with out limited knowledge would like to design a software that allows users to take notes, write essays, generate citations, etc. I was going to use XCode but I am the only one with a mac and we want to use python as much as we can. My questions –

What else should I learn before? JS, C+ ?

Where do I begin designing this? VS Code or something else?

I am just looking for general advice, Thank you all!