Stop Slacking

Inspiration

Staying organized and aware of deadlines can be a challenge for students, especially when communication is done via group chats on social media that can be distracting and unorganized. Slack provides numerous features that can be useful to help a user stay focused and informed, though businesses are the primary users. We decided to create a student-friendly Slack app to help students stay connected with their classmates and informed about their deadlines.

What it does

Students are able to send pdf documents containing questions and answers and our Slack app can aid with studying by asking the student questions from their document in a randomized order. Students are able to input their tasks and deadlines into a to-do list on our Slack app, which can be viewed at any time. Our Slack app also has the capabilities to send reminder messages when deadlines are approaching two days in advance to help the student meet their deadlines. For group collaboration, reminder messages are also sent when a task is assigned to a student or updated, to help students stay informed about their responsibilities.

How I built it

We used Ui Path to read PDF documents and input relevant data into a Google Sheet. A Google Sheet's script was edited to allow for tasks to be added to the Google Sheet or displayed in Slack. Standard Library was used to implement the rest of the slash commands, which included generating random questions to help with studying and displaying important dates taken from the course outline PDF.

Challenges I ran into

There was a lack of documentation for some tools and libraries that we used. Hence more research and looking into the resources we had available was required for us to understand the features available when writing the code required for our project.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Scanning PDFs to create a list of questions to ask the student automatically can save the user substantial time, allowing students to spend more time focusing on studying, instead of preparing resources to study from. As this part of our project was an essential that we as students would have liked to be able to use, bringing this feature to our app was one of our accomplishments.

What I learned

Working towards building this app allowed for reflection on what features we as students feel would make our studying more efficient, and allow us to stay focused. We were able to learn how to implement Ui Path and Standard Library to achieve the features we wanted in our app.

What's next for Stop Slacking

Our next steps would be adding more interactivity between students, such as creating a polling system.

Built With

• google-drive-api
• google-sheets-api
• javascript
• python
• slack
• standard-library
• ui-path