StudBot

Inspiration

The inspiration for our bot comes from GroupMe in a way to make the app better. GroupMe is a group chat mostly based for school and student networking. Although GroupMe is a great app that we use everyday there are definitely places where features can be added or improved.

What it does

Our bot is called StudBot. It is a discord bot with multiple functionalities. These include the ability to make polls, the ability to remind you or the server about upcoming assignments, the ability calculate ones semester GPA, the ability to look at ones assignments due in a week or a month, and the ability to calculate the points a student would get on a graded category based on grades and weight.

How we built it

We built our bot through javascript using a javascript library called Discord.js. Discord.js is a well wide-known library with a lot of documentation found on the internet. This was a huge reason why we decided to use it. We were also familiar with javascript.

Challenges we ran into

One big challenge we ran into was that the Blackboard API, used to access a students classes and grades, was unavailable to us due to it not working for anyone in the challenge. So we had to find workarounds to accomplish our goals. We were not able to implement all the functionalities we would have liked to have in the bot due to us not being able to access dynamic data. So because of this, most of our commands do not rely on the Blackboard API at all. This could in fact be a good thing because students that do not have their courses managed by Blackboard could use our bot to the same extent as ones who do.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of all the functionalities we were able to implement with no prior knowledge of creating a Discord bot. One of my teammates spent the whole time creating the polling functionality and when he finally got it to work it was a very happy experience. I'm proud of what we were able to finish.

What we learned

What's next for BoardBot

We plan to make use of the BlackBoard API as that was the original plan for the bot. In the future we plan to implement more commands and make the functionality of the bot more user friendly as well.