Envirobot

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  The custom made Envirobot Logo

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  The facts icon

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  The trivia icon

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  The news icon

Inspiration

We were thinking of developing a chatbot that had the ability to cause an impact, particularly in STEM fields. We realized that often the problem doesn't lie with interest. It lies with awareness and opportunity. That's why we decided to create Envirobot: to make important information about environmental protection accessible.

What it does

Envirobot allows the user to access relevant facts, news, trivia, and volunteer opportunities, all in one messaging program. The news articles are updated daily, and the facts are selected at random to insure that you get the best information. You can test your knowledge in the trivia game, and try to get the highest score. The answers for the trivia questions are accessible through Envirobot as well. Perhaps the most important feature, The Volunteer Feature, shows volunteer opportunities, and the date, time, and location they take place.

How we built it

Envirobot was built using Dexter, an open-source online chatbot programmer. Aspects of Javascript were implemented in order to serve certain purposes related to recalling information. For the most part, programs and softwares that did not require extensive coding were used, and we focused on Dexter to make the highest quality chatbot.

Challenges we ran into

In the beginning, we had hoped to implement BigParser to store the locations, organizations, dates, and names of the various volunteering events. Param spent more than 8 hours trying to fit the BigParser finance array model to Envirobot's volunteering model, and was unsuccessful. Not only did the wrangle.py not fit the data in order to create a constantly evolving data set, but Dexter's javascript implementation capabilities did not allow BigParser grid data. Ultimately, a fixed set of events from volunteermatch.org was used for the purpose of not leaving the app incomplete.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the bot's personality, the news feature, the trivia, and the opportunities feature. The trivia took about 8 hours to finish, while the opportunities was completed in an hour, as well as the news.

What we learned

We learned that we must first understand a basic structure of javascript data analysis and should consider the extent of the APIs we're using's capabilities before we begin a project with high data analysis ambitions. It would be helpful, in the future, to learn the applicability of any program we may use.

What's next for Envirobot

The definite next step would be to transfer to a more compatible coding platform, such as HTML or Javascript. While Dexter is simple and definitely the right starting point for coding beginners like our team, operating in conventional languages would greatly increase our potential capabilities. With this next step, we could very efficiently move to implement the BigParser grid and codes that we already wrote and ran. There's a lot of potential in _ Envirobot, _ both to increase environmental awareness in everyday people and to bring like-minded, passionate individuals together and to achieve something great.

Built With

• dexter
• javascript