-
-
SmartCheccBot
Inspiration
Students learn better when they get all the relevant resources while the material is fresh in their minds. Homework is usually assigned by instructors to students, and the feedback for the homework comes to a while ago. Because of this students do not get all the resources they need to understand the material on a timely basis. One important skill I learned from college is to go for office hours and ask the instructor if my approach to the solution is right. Unfrtuanety, instructors are only available for a short period of time, and students do not know whether their approach to the specific question are right or wrong. As a result, the learning process lacks efficiency. Because, of this problem, our team decided to make a system that substitutes the instructor, and verify answers, recommend approaches and give tips to the students based on the solution manual that the instructor wrote.
What it does
Basically, our SmarCheccBot runs on the Amazon Web Service, and gets solution as a text file from the instructor, and interact and assist students by checking answers and giving feedback on their solution. The instructor goes to Telegram App and find our SmartCheccBot, and upload the solution to the homework there. Then, the SmartCheccbot stores the file for later use. Students find the Bot in the telegram, and interact with the bot by specifying the question number they want to check the answer for. The system checks the answer from the instructors' solution, and ask the students to send the intermediate values they found. The Bot then gives feedback based on the answer. If the answer is wrong, the bot will recommend resources to refer to, specifies specific concepts and equations to use to solve the problem. If the answer the students send is right, the bot will recommend similar questions from the textbook and other resources.
How we built it
We wrote a Python script to interact with telegram API, and we deployed the code to the AWS. Specifically, we created a telegram bot from the telegram app, and we got a token for our bot. We used the token for the bot to add functionality to the bot. Our code has methods that sparse the text file, and prints out the right output to the user based on the question number they specified and the correctness of the answer they entered. In addition to that, the script has methods to download a file from the instructor and store it in the sever. The Bot accepts input like file, text, string, number and audio, and stores the files in the server, and send responses to the user based on the instruction given to the bot.
Challenges we ran into
The challenge we encountered was to come up with an idea that can solve a problem faced by many individuals in academia. After we came up with an idea, the biggest challenge was to find the right platform to deploy our code and to find the best algorithms to find the relevant response to the question the students are struggling with.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud for coming up with a new idea, writing a python script to find the relevant tips based on the solution the instructor uploaded and the students want help with, deploying our code to the AWS and making our bot usable by anyone for testing.
What we learned
We learned how to make use and make a telegram bot using telegram API, how to use Python to add functionality to the bot and deploy our code to the Amazon Web Server.
What's next for SmartCheccBot
The next stage of SmartCheccBot will automatically search for a solution online and give feedback to the students without giving the answer to the problem. The bot will also track the number of questions that the students are struggling with, and the instructor will go through the question in class. In addition to that, SmartCheccBot will have a web interactively with the teachers and students, and this will make it accessible by everyone.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.