Inspiration
COVID-19 has been a difficult experience for many, and as students, we have experienced the new virtual world first-hand. We can all agree that it is a hassle having to download numerous applications for the sake of our online learning. Furthermore, there are several applications that are already widely used. Seeing Discord being used widely amongst our peers, we wondered how it could be used to facilitate learning. We worked on Discord Classroom as a means to help teachers transition onto the platform, while also keeping it engaging for students.
What it does
Discord Classroom is a Discord bot that allows teachers to easily create and facilitate a classroom environment. With the use of few, simple commands, teachers can create text and voice channels, add lectures and notes, and even have mini quizzes to engage the class.
How we built
Discord Classroom is created using the Python programming language and Discord.py library. The functionality of the Discord bot is mainly provided through the use of basic programming principles, whereas other features used external libraries. Notably, the library SymPy, which is used for symbolic mathematical equations. Using this library, the teacher can even generate quizzes using LaTeX where students can answer any way they like, assuming it is an equivalent equation.
Challenges we ran into
Discord.py has been updated many times over the years resulting in many different versions of it with different methods to accomplish the same goals. A lot of the resources that we found were on older versions of Discord.py, so there was a lot of time spent trying to figure out what worked on the version we used. Another challenge we faced was trying to implement LaTeX images to the quizzes when displaying images. We had a lot of trouble with trying to display the images within Discord’s embeds, so we were required to scrape the idea due to time.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Individually we are proud that the components of the bot that we worked on are running. As a group, we are proud that we have created a running bot that is able to create text, voice channels, pop quizzes, create schedules and add lectures and notes.
What we learned
Discord.py Python LaTeX
What's next for Discord Classroom
Next time we want to: Provide previews of the lectures/notes through discord embeds Create a feature that allows students to read powerpoints slides through embeds Let the teacher provide feedback to the students when asked Show the students their grades for the mini quizzes Show the students correct answers with appropriate latex formatting
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