Coordinate

Note

Check out our recent publication on Coordinate at SIGCSE TS '25: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3641554.3701961

Coordinate is a novel educational tool based on Discord. Coordinate is designed to help instructors and faculty manage large computer science courses. Coordinate automatically provides several features which are integral to the classroom experience for students, including:

• Authentication: Students (and course staff) must authenticate with their student ID to gain access to the server. This ensures that only students enrolled in the course can access the server.
• Office Hours: Course staff can manage their own office hours schedule through the bot, which will dynamically update the public schedule when changes are made. Students are able to queue for virtual office hours in a fair manner. Course staff can easily take breaks, manage students in the queue, or mark their office hours as being hosted through a different platform. The office hours system also gives students the chance to provide feedback on the office hours experience.
• Extensions: Using Qualtrics, students can request extensions for course staff to review. Upon approval, the bot will automatically update the student's deadline in Canvas, or another assignment provider. The student is also notified of the outcome of their request.
• Question Management: Coordinate helps to manage questions by automatically marking questions as unanswered or answered, as appropriate. Furthermore, students are reminded of common tips for asking better questions, and the system prevents students from asking more than one question at a time. At the end of each week, the bot also provides a summary of which staff were the most active in answering questions.

Setup

Ready to dive in? Check out our docs at: https://coordinate.cbrxyz.com!

License

For licensing information, see LICENSE. In summary, you are free to use this work without commercialization and must include the original license in any derivative works. Copyright is held by the University of Florida Research Foundation, Inc.

Citation

You may use the following citation to reference Coordinate in your work:

@inproceedings{Brown2025,
  series = {SIGCSE TS 2025},
  title = {Coordinate: A Virtual Classroom Management Tool For Large Computer Science Courses Using Discord},
  url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3641554.3701961},
  DOI = {10.1145/3641554.3701961},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1},
  publisher = {ACM},
  author = {Brown,  Cameron and Cruz Castro,  Laura},
  year = {2025},
  month = feb,
  pages = {165–171},
  collection = {SIGCSE TS 2025}
}