[Ubuntu-Classroom] ClassBot

Nathan Handler nhandler at ubuntu.com
Sun Feb 21 19:06:34 GMT 2010


Hello everyone,

First, I would like to thank all of you for your patience this past
week. I realize that you have probably received a fair amount of
emails from Launchpad, and I apologize for that. It should stop now,
ClassBot now has its own project [1]

Now, I would like to introduce you all to ClassBot. ClassBot is an IRC
bot that will be helping us to hold sessions in #ubuntu-classroom. I
have been working on it a lot over the past week in order to get it
ready for the 48 Hours of Ubuntu Manual Learning event, and I think I
have met that goal. However, this would not have been possible without
a LOT of help from Chris Johnston. He has spent countless hours
testing the bot, filing bugs, creating a blueprint to keep me on
track, and even contributing a few patches. Without his help, there is
no way that ClassBot would be ready right now. Thanks a lot Chris!

ClassBot provides several features that should make it much easier for
everyone involved with the classroom. A few of its features can be
seen in the blueprint [2].

One important feature of ClassBot is question management. It will
detect any questions asked in #ubuntu-classroom-chat that are prefixed
with 'QUESTION:' and store them in a queue for the session leader (or
a session helper/bot admin) to process. This means that session
leaders/helpers will no longer need to copy/paste questions from
#ubuntu-classroom-chat.

Another useful feature is that ClassBot is capable of parsing an ical
file. This ical provides ClassBot with lots of information about a
session. Using this ical, ClassBot will take care of updating the
/topic in #ubuntu-classroom and #ubuntu-classroom-chat to show what
the current session is, it will voice/devoice session leaders, and set
the channel as +m. This is one reason why we will now be using Google
Calendar to store a calendar of events for the classroom. An HTML
version of this calendar is also available [3].

These are only a few of ClassBot's features. A wiki page [4] has been
started to document the bot's usage, but it is still incomplete. I am
sure I am also forgetting something in this email, so if you have any
questions, please do not hesitate to ask.

Thanks,
Nathan Handler

[1] https://launchpad.net/classbot
[2] https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu-classroom/+spec/scheduler-bot
[3] http://people.ubuntu.com/~nhandler/classroom.html
[4] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Classroom/ClassBot



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