- Description
- Bot Commands
- Installation and Running
- Testing
- Features for Phase 1
- New Features added in Phase 2
- Future Scope
- Want to contribute?
- License
Click Below to Watch Our Video!
Software Engineering Project for CSC 510 : Phase II
Teacher's Pet is a Discord Bot for class instructors to streamline their Discord servers. Discord is a great tool for communication and its functionalities can be enhanced by bots and integrations. There are many tools for organizing classes, but they are often hard to manage. They rarely have good communication mechanisms or ability to connect with other tools. This bot allows instructors to host their classes on Discord, combining communication tools with functionality for assignments, scheduling, and office hours. Instructors and students no longer have to go between platforms to view course details, forums, events, calls, and more.
!setInstructor <@member> Set a server member to be an instructor (Instructor command)
!removeInstructor <@member> Remove a server member from the instructor role (Instructor command)
!getInstructor Get the current instructors in the server
!attendance Find attendance from voice channel (Instructor command)
!ask "<question>" Ask a question
!answer <question_number> "<answer>" Answer a question
!poll <command> Run a poll for students (Instructor command)
!create Start creating an event (Instructor command)
!oh enter Enter an office hour queue as an individual student
!oh enter <group_id> Enter an office hour queue with a group of students
!oh exit Exit the office hour queue
!oh next Go to next student in queue as an instructor (Instructor command)
!help Gets the descriptions for all commands
!help <command> Describes a command in detail
!ping Find the latency of network
!stats Gets the statistics of system and softwares used
In addition to the packages from requirements.txt which need to be installed, please have the following installed on your machine:
To install and run Teacher's Pet, follow instructions in the Installation and Testing Guide.
To run tests on the Teacher's Pet, follow instructions in the Installation and Testing Guide.
When Teacher's Pet has been added to a new server as a bot, it will do the following:
- Create a new role called Instructor with Administrative permissions if one does not already exist
- Add the owner of the guild to the Instructor role
- Create a #q-and-a channel if one doesn't already exist
- Create a #calendar channel if one doesn't already exist
In addition to this auto-set up, there is also a command which allows a user with the Instructor role to give the same role to another user. This command will only work for users with the Instructor role already (for example, the guild owner).
The Q&A functionality allow students to ask and answer questions anonymously. The questions are numbered and when answers are sent, they are combined with the question so they can be easily found. Answers are also marked with Student Ans and Instructor Ans to distinguish between the sources.
To ask a question, type !ask "Question" in the #q-and-a channel. Example: !ask "When is the midterm?".
To answer a question type !answer <question_number> "Answer" in the #q-and-a channel. Example: !answer 1 "Oct 12".
Student answer:
Instructor answer:
Events are items relevant to a class that are time-sensitive. Currently, the types of events include office hours, exams, and assignments. Events in a class are kept track of, and assignments/exams are displayed in a calendar for students and instructors to see.
Events can be created by instructors. Creation of an event can be initiated in the private instructor-commands channel with the !create command. The bot will ask the instructor about various details for the event. Once the event is created, it should exist persistently within the system and will be added to the event list.
The calendar is updated at the creation of any new event that gets displayed on the calendar. Everything is ordered by date and sorted into two categories, past events and future events. Links attached to assignments are displayed in the calendar as well. The footer of the calendar is tagged with the last time it was updated.
The bot contains functionality for handling TA office hours. After a TA office hour event is added and it is time for a TA's office hour to open, the bot will automatically create office hour channels in the server, allowing students to enter the office hour queue and instructors to help students based on the queue. Once the closing time for the office hour is reached, the channels related to the TA's office hour are automatically deleted.
Students may wish to receive individual help from a TA or they may want to join other students for help as a group (when they need help with a group project, etc); TeachersPetBot supports both of these use cases. A student may enter the queue as an individual using the !oh enter command within the text channel for an ongoing office hour. Upon doing so, a new group will be created and the student will become the sole member of that group. Student may enter existing groups by inputting !oh enter <group_id>, where group_id is the ID of the group the student wishes to join (group IDs will be displayed in the queue). Once it is an individual's (or group's) turn to be helped by the instructor, all members of the group will be invited into a voice channel where they will be able to talk with the TA.
Upon entering this command in an office hour channel:
The queue will look like this:
Upon entering an existing group, say group '000':
The queue will look like this:
A student may wish to exit the office hour queue for whatever reason; they may do so by typing !oh exit in the channel they are in the queue for.
If a student exists in the queue:
And enters this command:
The student will be wiped from the queue:
Once the instructor is ready to help the next student in the queue, they may enter !oh next in the office hour text channel. Upon doing so, DMs will be sent to all group members next in the queue notifying them that it is their turn, and they will be able to enter the office hour voice channel.
If a student exists in the queue:
And an instructor wishes to help the next student in the queue:
The student will be invited to the instructor's voice channel and the queue will be advanced:
Using the Python package better-profanity, Teacher's Pet will catch profane words sent by members of the guild, delete the message, and re-send the exact message with the bad word(s) censored out. It will also catch profane words in messages which have been edited to incude bad words. This package supports censoring based off any non-alphabetical word dividers and swears with custom characters. NOTE: Currently the Bot does not censor swears which have had extra alphabetical characters added.
Upon a new member joining the channel the BOT send the member a welcome message to the member in a private chat:
The remove instructor command can only be used by an instructor in the instructor commands channel. I removes a existing instructor from the role of an instructor and revokes the members permission to access the instructor commands channel.
When the remove instructor command is used:
The getInstructor command can be used in any channel and list outs the members in the guild who have Instructor role.
When the get instructor command is used:
This functionality can be used only by the instructor. instructor-commands is the channel used. The command checks the total students in the guild with the students currently available in the General voice channel. It then generates the number of attendees and absentees. Then the students list is pushed to the instructor-commands channel.
When the attendance is requested by the instructor in the correct channel:
When the attendance is requested by the instructor in the wrong channel:
This is a custom help command which is describes the command and on demand of a specific command, it provides syntax of the command, permitted users and channels. This command can be executed in any channel and by anyone.
General Help:
Help for a specific command:
Building upon the existing python package better-profanity, Teacher's pet, in addition to catching the existing profane words, will now give an option to declare custom words as profane. This adds them to the list of words to be filtered and any further use of said word would cause it to be censored.
NOTE: Currently the Bot does not censor swears which have had extra alphabetical characters added.
Working :
Use the below syntax to include the custom word to the profane list:
Whenever the above word is used the below flow is triggered :
This task runs in the background, once a day it checks if there are any assignments and exams coming up and reminds students. It works as follows :
Whenever there is nothing to remind :
This command allows the Instructors to create a custom poll for the class. The command takes the following as inputs - Duration of the poll, Topic on focus, Options . Once the poll duration is complete the the command ends and displays the result of the poll. Note: A student can only vote for single option.
Example: !poll 2 "Topic for Tmrw's class" Physics chemistry biology maths
Since the bot is hosted on cloud ( In this case Heroku ). Its crucial to know the latency of the bot. This command !ping returns the ping and the corresponding response time.
For the purpose of Debugging and maintaining the bot !stats command has been added to keep track of CPU usage, Bot up time, Bot version, No. of users and Memory usage.
This bot has endless possibilities for functionality. Features which we are interested in adding but did not have time for include but are not limited to:
- Custom Events
- Allow events to be edited
- Show error information on discord
- Handle command spamming
- Add new roles
- Track participation
- Refactor code to use cogs
- Accomodate Multiple Office hours for an instructor
- Office hour channel extension
For a deatiled description of each of the above future enhancements listed visit Phase 2 Board.
Check out our CONTRIBUTING.md for instructions on contributing to this repo and helping enhance this Discord Bot, as well as our Code of Conduct guidelines.
The project is licensed under the MIT License.