Uwaterloo Course info Reddit Bot

Bot in action

Inspiration

We are a group of students that wanted to use our technical know-how to help future students entering the University of Waterloo.

What it does

The Uwaterloo Course info Reddit Bot (UCRB) uses Reddit as a central platform for students to ask for information about courses offered at the University of Waterloo. We chose Reddit as our main platform due to its developer-friendly interface and we understood that by using the comment feature of a subreddit we would be able to help future students best.

How we built it

We began by acquiring a .CSV file from the University of Waterloo API. This gave us access to the courses offered at the university to integrate into our bot. We then proceeded to get the required authorization information from Reddit to create a bot. We finally coded the bot in virtual IDE (replt.it). For the bot to run indefinitely, we used a free web server application to run it.

Challenges we ran into

Our group only had a basic understanding of building an interactive bot. An initial challenge we faced was understanding how to authorize the bot and connect the various features of the API's.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely proud that a group of students who have almost no knowledge in creating a bot or using APIs managed to build a fully functional bot that anyone can use.

What we learned

We developed our knowledge in integrating API's in our project. We learned how to use different python libraries like "pandas" and "praw". We also learned that however intimidating a challenge may be, if you put in the effort, you will definitely reap the benefits.

What's next for Uwaterloo Course info Reddit Bot

We feel that UCRB has an amazing future ahead. With the limited time, we were only able to display course information, however, with more time and resources, we will be able to extend the features of the bot displaying more information like schedules, admission information etc.