HelperBot

Inspiration

As education has shifted to online, many classes that we have taken have switched to using Discord over other meeting services, such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams. One problem that we have noticed with the switch to discord is that other students are sometimes unfamiliar with the application and have trouble accessing what they want. Additionally, in many servers with labs or office hours, there is a system where students would send a message and a teaching assistant would manually pick off the student's message and delete it when they were finished helping. We built this basic Discord Bot to help streamline and automate this help process.

What it does

The functionality of this Discord bot is limited, however it was created to solve a common and tedious problem that we have observed in Discord servers for our classes. Our discord bot has an "!help" command. When the students would request for help, they would type the command, followed by their message. The discord bot would automatically delete the student's message and create and embedded message with the @id of the student and their question. Upon reaction of a check mark, symbolizing "finished helping", or a red "x", meaning "no help needed," the embedded message from the bot would be deleted as well. There is an additional "!info" command detailing how this bot works for clarity.

How we built it

We used Discord's API to build a Discord Bot which was written in Python.

Challenges we ran into

Some of the challenges we ran into during the creation of the Discord bot was our lack of experience in using Discord API. As a result, there were challenges with accessing user information and input as well as formatting output messages inside our test discord server. The addition of reactions and removing them based on the user served to be a major challenge; however, there were many online resources to assist us.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was our first hackathon and we are proud that we were able to come up with a product idea and implement it. We also overcame many challenges in the coding process and were able to work as a team to learn how to code a discord bot with no prior experience on coding them.

What we learned

Throughout the hackathon, we learned how to effectively work as a team and how to use the discord API to build a discord bot.

What's next for HelperBot

For potential improvements of the helper bot, we could have it implement a ratings system for students in a CS class, so that if a student successfully helps someone with their code, the student receiving the help can privately rate the help they received through a PM from the discord bot. This would encourage students to work together, and the ratings system would be useful for aspiring TA’s that are currently in the class, where a professor can quantifiably measure a student’s impact on the community, and effectively find students who are more involved in helping others to select for the TA role in the future.