Development of a chatbot for informing students of the schedule

Abstract

The article describes the process of developing a chatbot to provide students with information about schedules using the Telegram mobile messenger. During the research, the following tasks have been performed: the analysis of notification systems for their use in the educational process, identification of problems of notifying students about the schedule (dynamic environment, traditional presentation of information, lack of round-the-clock access), substantiation of the choice of mobile technologies and Telegram messenger, determination of the requirements to the software, generalization of the chatbot functioning features, description of the structure, functionality of the program to get information about the schedule using a chatbot. The following tasks have been programmatically implemented: obtaining data from several pages of a spreadsheet (faculty / institute, red / green week, group number, day of the week, period number, discipline name, information about the teacher); presentation of data in a convenient form for the messenger (XML); implementation of the mechanism of convenient presentation of data in the messenger (chatbot). Using Python and the Telegram API, the software has been designed to increase students; immediacy in getting the information about the schedules, minimizing the time spent, and optimizing of planning of student activities and higher education institution functioning.