FC'22 Member Alex
How can we get students participate in class group chats?
The original inspiration for this project came about during a discussion I had with my friend about increasing engagement in our class Slack community. We discussed implementing some sort of reward system that would make students more interested in participating and the possibility of adding a Slack bot came to mind. My hope was that I could find a Slack bot that would be fun to use so more of my classmates would chat in our Slack channel.
What's already in the marketplace?
There are many Slack bots that can help drive up digital community engagement. Popular ones include Hubot, Howdy, and Meekan, which can assist with tasks such as scheduling meetings, posting messages to channels, and conducting polls and surveys. There are also bots like Yogi that provide fun features such as games and trivia, which can help to foster a sense of community and encourage participation. However, there was a lack of options for incentivizing users to participate using real world rewards. I wanted something that stands alone as a way to make Slack feel more like a community.
What digital communities are missing?
Based on some research and a few customer interviews, I learned that one of the main reasons students don’t participate on Slack is because they fear that no one will respond to them. Putting messages out only for no one to respond or react can be embarrassing and students would rather not send anything at all. Because of this, I decided to build my own custom Slack bot, Moby, that can use AI to actually respond to people’s messages and add to the conversation! I also want Moby to be able to delegate rewards to the users that contribute the most insightful content to the Slack communities. My hope is that these two features will be enough to inspire people to feel more comfortable communicating in Slack. Check out my pitch that explains this in greater detail:
You can reach out to me at alt9035@stern.nyu.edu.