O.S.C.A.R.

O.S.C.A.R.
Bot Command list

Inspiration

OSCAR is a discord bot whose name stands for Online School Communication Assistant Robot. The goal of this project was to create a discord bot that would assist with tasks to help students in online school. Especially for students who struggle with focusing, by bringing a helper bot right to discord, we hoped to encourage students to stay on task.

What it does

OSCAR can perform tasks such as playing music, creating a to-do list of tasks, creating reminders, and using Google to search up images.

How we built it

We ran OSCAR on a Replit page with the cloud and used Python libraries such as discord.py, youtube_dl, and json to build it. The show command uses Google Cloud Platform. We ran the bot on Heroku.

Challenges we ran into

Managing all the different tasks at the same time made a fun challenge. With the music player, figuring out the best quality of audio to optimize download speed was difficult yet essential. The learning curve for GCP was also a bit of a healthy challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

OSCAR is a bot that has already helped students while studying in just the last 24 hours! We're really proud of how easy the commands are to understand and use, and how helpful they can be. We're also proud of the diverse types of commands OSCAR can accomplish. Rather than just having one function, the bot is capable of a wide range of helpful tasks.

What we learned

Navigating how to use discord.py on Replit was a learning curve. Despite having little experience on both, our team worked together to communicate through all of the issues we had. By using our previous knowledge on python, we were able to use existing strategies of code debugging and problem solving to navigate the new libraries. We also learned about the functionality of a discord bot, specifically in what types of commands are easiest for the user to call. We then adjusted our command calls accordingly to fit into what worked best.

What's next for O.S.C.A.R.

We would love to add more features to OSCAR to make it even more useful. For instance, adding commands to link to online tools such as calculators, adding pre-loaded images like formula sheets, and so on. We could also derive time tables from post-secondary websites, and have an internship notification each time a new one is posted.