tarynheilman / questionator

A flask web app to automatically collect a student roster and avatars from a Slack channel. The Questionator will select a student at random (in the pool of students who have answered the least questions) to ask a question in class.

The Questionator

The Questionator is a Python 3 Flask web application that collects student names and profile pictures from a student Slack channel and then selects one to "questionate."

It filters out any member with an @galvanize.com email address so you won't ask any support staff or instructors who are also on the channel questions.

Because this interacts with Slack's API, you will need an API token. You can get an API key here. Set this key to a local environment alias in your .bash_profile, .bashrc, or .zshrc resource file. Use the alias name SLACK_TOKEN so the python script will pull it in automatically when launched.

For example:

export SLACK_TOKEN="your token string here..."

Don't forget that you have to re-source you bash profile after editing it...

$ source ~/.bash_profile

API calls are made through python using the Slacker package. You will need to install this before you run the script.

$ pip install slacker

You specify the Slack channel your class is using by passing it as a system argument when you exectute the script from terminal.

To run the Questionator:

$ python questionator.py --chan='channel_name' 

This would collect student names, Slack usernames, and profile pics for members in the 'channel_name' channel.

The script takes about 20 seconds to initialize with all the necessary info from the Slack API. After which, it will launch the Flask App (running on port 8080).

What It Does

After collecting all the class members, it initializes the number of questions asked to zero for everyone. When you press the button Ask a question it gets the list of students who have answered the fewest questions (initially, this will be everyone since they have all answered zero questions). It then makes a random selection from this list of whom to ask the question. The username and profile pic for that student are collected and displayed on screen. That student then has their "number of questions asked" incremented by one. This helps track how many questions have been asked, as well as remove the possibility of asking the same student two or more consecutive questions.