Online University requires students to deal with multiple platforms: Zoom, Canva, Piazza, Gradescope, Crowdmark, BlackBoard, and many more. However, Discord was chosen as the chatting and interaction place by many of these students. So what if, instead of making them go to new environments, we take the academic world to their favorite place? Soph-E is here to help with this task.
Soph-E adds more than 20 commands to the Discord server. Among them, we have: Creating breakout rooms Asking and answering questions in a forum-style way Creating polls Organizing a class calendar Using Google search engine An integrated calculator Matching tutors and tutees
Sophia comes from Greek and means "Wisdom". The name Soph-E is our way of expressing that the project's goal is to spread wisdom (Soph) in an online environment (-E).
Soph-E was built using Python. The discord.py library was decisive for the project to work, allowing our team to connect the platform. Repl.it database was used to store information and both Repl.it and GitHub to collaborate.
Because we're all rookie hackers, none of us had worked with databases before. We spent a considerable amount of time trying to use a SQL database for Soph-E, which did not work in the end. However, we found out that Repl.it offers a database, so we switched plans.
Our team's main accomplishment was to build a project that allowed four people with divergent backgrounds to collaborate in a meaningful bot for all of us. Our members are from four different countries (Canada, Congo, India, and Brazil) and include a high schooler. However, Soph-E is impactful for all of us, and all group members brought crucial knowledge to the final design.
Innovation happens in a funny way. None of Soph-E's commands is truly new or revolutionary. However, just like smartphones, Soph-E aims to gather many useful tools to transform Discord into a better academic platform – what our team believes to be innovative.
Some Soph-E commands are not able to run on every server. The next step for us would be solving this issue. Additionally, hosting Soph-E using a cloud server and a better database would improve its accessibility. Finally, testing our bot in a real classroom environment as a way of verifying its usability would be a significant step for Soph-E.