Discord Chatbot with AI for Education

UX Researcher, Engineer

Project Overview

We developed a Discord chatbot that integrates course information and encourages communication among students and groups. With AI integration, the chatbot is designed to evolve, becoming increasingly efficient in facilitating collaboration and information sharing.

My Contributions

Conducted an analysis of teacher and student needs to ensure the solution addressed key communication challenges.
Developed a Discord chatbot with AI integration to improve collaboration and information sharing among class members.
Utilized various resources, including Discord API, OpenAI API, and Google Apps Script, to build a fully functional chatbot.

Role

UX Researcher & Engineer

Team

Solo

TImeframe

2022/10-2023/03
6 months

Tools

Python:
Discord API
OpenAI API
Javascript:
Google Apps Script

Quick Result

Here's the prototype using Discord API, Google Apps Script and OpenAI API to fullfill.

Homework notification using Google Apps Script to send notification to Discord channel.

Presenting feedback using Discord API to send commands to the chatbot.

Chatbot assistant with AI using Discord API and OpenAI API to summarize student's discussion.

Background

In collaborative design courses, effective communication among group members and across groups is essential. However, with a limited number of teachers and assistants, it becomes challenging to track each group’s progress and foster interaction. The project focuses on students in technical institutions, where most students have focused on their specific abilities since high school. We chose the department for observation, which has half of the students from a design background and the other from an engineering background. This diverse environment was ideal for observing communication challenges during group projects.

Problem

We found that most students in technical institutions have strong practical skills. However, they usually work in isolation during team projects. In this case, the students usually can complete their tasks individually but struggle to explain or understand the contributions of their peers.

We identified a lack of communication as a primary factor contributing to this disconnect.

Interview and Personas

We conducted observations and interviews with the teaching group and the students. We summarize the target as the following personas.

Persona of teacher assistant

Persona of student

Key Findings → Next Step

Insufficient communication → Design a chatbot to enhance class interaction
While many students are creative and full of ideas, a lack of communication often limits them to expressing themselves only within their own work. Additionally, the limited number of teachers and assistants makes facilitating communication across all groups difficult. To address this, we designed a chatbot assistant with three key features aimed at improving interaction during class.

Chatbot Research

We did research on project-managing applications with chatbots. Although Discord did not perform better in project management than Slack, we still think the development of the Discord chatbot is easier and more diverse. Hence, we chose Discord for the following development.

Key Findings

Discord is the ideal platform for developing chatbots and managing project tasks
While Slack is the top choice for teachers to track progress—followed by Teams and Discord. Discord offers unique advantages for chatbot development, especially with its Web 3.0 support, which enables users to create highly flexible and customizable bots. Given these capabilities, we chose Discord as our primary application.

We designed three features of the chatbot for class timing: before class, during class, and after class.

Design and Features

1. Homework notification

To enhance communication, one of the most intuitive approaches is to create opportunities for interaction. Before class, we focused on homework submission. Recognizing that some students like to "peek" at other groups' work for inspiration, we integrated Google Sheets for homework submission. Once students submit their work, the Discord bot automatically notifies the class channel, enabling other groups to view submissions. This promotes knowledge sharing and facilitates communication across groups.

2. Presentation Feedback

Although there are numerous opportunities for communication during class, most students tend to interact only within their own groups. To encourage cross-group interaction, we focused on presentations. Each group is required to present their work or discussion to the class. The Discord bot posts the content of each group's presentation, and other groups can provide feedback in real time using emojis. For example, 👂 signifies "I want to hear more," while 😖 indicates "I didn’t understand." Discord’s custom emoji feature allows students to create personalized feedback, helping the presenting group gauge their performance and identify areas for improvement.

3. Chatbot Assistant with AI

(Note: ChatGPT launched in Nov, 2022)

To enrich after-class discussions, we integrated OpenAI’s API with Discord, providing students with their own AI-powered chatbot assistant. This AI assistant supports students by summarizing meetings, generating ideas, and answering questions when teaching assistants are unavailable. As AI capabilities continue to advance, students can engage in deeper, more extensive discussions, enhancing their learning experience and collaboration.