Welcome information

Note: The project and descriptions are in english, but the CoderDojo is in Austria -> german language. So the Discord messages are all in german.

Hello person, who is slightly interested in programming. This is our CoderDojo Workshop Planer. What? You don't know what that is? You don't even know what the CoderDojo is?

Well here's a short summary about the CoderDojo and this project.

What's the CoderDojo?

The CoderDojo is a programming club for kids and teens between 6 - 17 years in Linz/Leonding. We meet every two weeks for our Regular CoderDojo and every other week for a Playground. You can work on a project yourself, with our mentors or with friends. You don't have the slightest idea about programming? Well don't worry, our mentors will help you and beginners are usually going to start with Scratch (if you want).

What's the Online CoderDojo?

Since quarantine, we weren't able to do our usual CoderDojo meetings, so we changed it to online meetings every week.

How were the meetings organized before the Workshop Planer?

Before this glorious project, all the meetings had to be organized manually. It was a lot of work, because to create workshops, the admin/ mentors had to follow these steps:

• Workshop info were written in markdowns in "date folders" (more info below)
• These info were manually transfered to a MongoDB database
• Zoom meetings had to be created/ updated
• The info had to be displayed at the CoderDojo website
• Newsletters had to be sent out -> the data had to be transfered manually
• Mentor got emails with their workshop info and Zoom meeting URL/user/hostkey -> the data had to be transfered manually

If one mentor wanted to change something about their workshop, all these steps had to be repeated. It costed a lot of hard work/time and nerves.

What does the CoderDojo Workshop Planer do?

So, our program automates these steps above with some nice features.

Functionality

Explanation down below

Get the data

Note: We seperate the program with the input file, so in this repository is our program, which is deployed to Azure via a GitHub Action on a push request and heres the link for the other repository, where the yml files are in

• Basically you create a date folder YYYY-MM-DD
• In the folder is a yml file with all the data we need for processing the workshop
• The data is sent via GitHub Webhook to our Azure function (the program) on a push request
• We get the body and transform the Json into C#
• This data is sent to a ServiceBus Topic
• The data is written into a MongoDB database via a subsciption method of the topic

Now we have the data in the database.

Displaying the data on the website

From the database the data is displayed on the workshop schedule on the CoderDojo website. This is done with the method events. The website send a HTTP Trigger to this function, which sends the data back. For only listing future meetings, there is a parameter in the URL called past. It can be set true or false

Creating Zoom meetings

If you set the status flag in the yml file to Scheduled, Zoom meetings are going to be created or updated. How is that done?

Well, we have 4 Zoom user available, so we send a GET request to Zoom to get our users. Then we check if the meeting already exists, so that we won't have it double.

Then we send a PATCH if it already exists and a POST request if not. How do we check if it already exists?

If the yml file we have a shortCode flag, where we write a word, with specifies that workshop. In Zoom we write that flag in the describtion, so that we can find it later.

After we created/updated a meeting we write/update the attendance URL and the Zoom user the into our database.

Getting a newsletter template

For every upcoming event, the CoderDojo admin sends a newsletter where the workshops are listed. To automate this task too, there is a nice feature.

Basically the program reads the workshops from the database with a specific date filter from the url and transforms this into a html template, which it sends back and displays it. The admin uses that template to transforms it via MailChimp into a newsletter.

Sending emails to mentors

Our mentors get emails about their workshops. In those emails is the basic info listed like

• Title
• Begintime
• Endtime
• Description
• Zoom user
• Zoom URL
• Hostkey

The hostkey is for hosting the meeting, so we only send the mail to the first listed mentor. Why? Because there'll b e a conflict, if there are two hosts in a Zoom meeting. We also send a ics file with the mail. (A calender entry), that we also build with the workshop data.

To send the email, we use SendGrid. As URL parameter there's the date again.

To get the mentor's info, we created an extra collection in the database with the mentor's

• nickname
• firstname
• lastname
• email

Discord-Bot

The CoderDojo also has a Discord server where all info for workshops are being posted. There are also channels, where you can communicate with mentors or other coders.

So, we implemented a Discord bot, which sends a specific message each time, the workshop is being updated.

How does it work?

During going through all workshops in our WriteEventToDB function, we call methods from the DiscordBot class and build a message with the data, we get from the workshop. The function BuildBotMessage tests if any data was changed and creates a message, which we send to Discord. To send it to the correct channel we created a Webhook. If the title was changed, we appended certain emotes to the message, so that it looks nicer. Same for the time.

Sample:

How to construct a correct workshop plan

Create a folder

• Folder format must be YYYY-MM-DD like 2020-07-16
• Create for every date a new folder

Create the YML file

• File must be named PLAN.yml or plan.yml.
• It must be a .yml or .yaml file.
• Insert your workshop data in that file.
  Do not create a file for every single workshop! Only one big file!

Syntax

workshops:
- begintime: your time
  endtime: your time
  status: Draft/Published/Scheduled
  title: yourtitle
  targetAudience: your audience
  description: |
    your describtion
  prerequisites: |
    - your prerequisites + links
  mentors:
    - you
  shortcode: your-shortcode

Parameter

That's how your mentors collection need to look like

Note: Create for each mentor a new document

{
    "nickname": "Someone's nickname",
    "email": "someone@something.at",
    "firstname": "Someone's firstname",
    "lastname": "Someone's lastname"
}

These following parameter are needed to be created in the Azure function

Useful links

• CoderDojo
• CoderDojo-Meetings
• Scratch
• MailChimp
• SendGrid
• Connection-Strings
• Service-Bus-Connection
• Zoom-Token
• Discord Webhooks
• Discord Bots