Tutorbot

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Conceptualizing

Inspiration

Traditional Q&A forums are not suitable for asking quick questions. You always have that fear of "asking a dumb question" in public. Tutorbot team came up with a convenient and stress-free method for seeking a quick help within your community.

What It Does

Student's Perspective

When you get stuck, you can put out an "SOS" with a simple command from your discord server.

!sos c++ c : How is std::unique_ptr different from pointers?

This SOS signal will notify mentors who have both c++ and c skills. They will quickly answer your short question, and they can even stay to have helpful conversations with you.

Mentor's Perspective

If you want to help other people, you can register yourself as a mentor. Just type in a command with your technical stack.

!register python js react

Now, you will get notified by Tutorbot if someone out there desperately needs your help.

Of course, it can be difficult to help multiple people at simultaneously. You can always mark yourself "busy" by letting Tutorbot know.

!busy

Just do not forget to delete the "busy" status after you're done.

!free

Easter-egg

!wisdom

How I Built It

Tutorbot is powered by Python and Discord API.

discord.py library is used to access Discord API, and Tutorbot is deployed on Heroku hosting service.

Here's a google doc that we used for planning & organizing specs.

Story of Tutorbot Team

Tutorbot team is an ad-hoc team assembled right after the opening ceremony of Same Home Different Hacks event, so we had very diverse programming experience. However, when we decided to develop Tutorbot, everyone was eager to make it happen by learning new material. Tutorbot team believes our project can actually benefit many programmers' communities like MLH, so we will continue seeking contributions to Tutorbot project after this event.

What's Next for Tutorbot

Here are a few idea that can make Tutorbot more useful to communities:

Provide a method to access help from external services like StackOverflow, GitHub and Reddit.
If a mentor forgets to erase "busy" status after one's mentoring session, automatically erase the busy status after N hours.
Publish discussions from discord to online Q&A forum, if it can help general population and worth sharing.