CometBot

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  Discord Profile Picture of CometBot

Inspiration

We were inspired to make CometBot because although eLearning and GroupMe are popular among students, they lack enough capabilities to make the virtual learning experience feel simple and easy. While GroupMe allows communication, there isn't a simple way to create a study group or group meeting. While eLearning also provides a list of classes and Blackboard Collaborate, there is often a disconnect among students and the professor. With our Discord bot, professors can see which students frequently attend class, motivating students to attend and making them feel rewarded. This can also help the teacher easily spot out committed students. Plus, Discord is a platform students like to engage on, making our product more popular among students. As TA's and professors start to organize tutoring and review sessions here, they will likely see a higher turnout rate due to the popularity of discord, our easy-to-use app, and our reward system for attending class.

What it does

Our bot can motivate students to attend class to increase their streak. Maybe the student with the best attendance can even earn a reward, as determined by the professor. Students can create events, such as study sessions, making the process of finding a study group better than in GroupMe.

How we built it

we developed an app in Repl.it, a cloud-based IDE for developing programs, and coded our discord bot in python.

Challenges we ran into

Understanding and implementing python. There were different data types and structures such as tuples and dicts to learn about. getting the bot's $streak command to work was particularly difficult to figure out. Also, coding for discord meant setting it up differently than a traditional python program.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have managed to teach ourselves some python and made our first Discord bot within 12 hours in our first hackathon!

What we learned

We learned the programming language of python as well as how to create a custom bot in Discord.

What's next for CometBot

In future extensions, our goal is to understand Discord documentation better, so that we can add features such as reacting to a message to join a class rather than being so typing-intensive. An important next-step for CometBot is to make it more secure: right now, you can type in any name and join a class and count the attendance streak under that name. To make it more secure, we should figure out how to make the bot automatically use discord usernames rather than the user-entered name. Additionally, connecting the bot to blackboard could allow us to double-check if a student is in the correct classes and has the correct streak. Adding additional lists/features, such as allowing students to add exam dates and homework due dates (instead of just classes), and getting a list of only the classes they have joined rather than every class created in the server.

Built With

• discord
• python
• repl