This project was created to help with this problem: How can I introduce my niece and nephew to the wonders of programming? I needed a program environment that is
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frictionless, because every bit of annoyance about installing tooling, bad editors, annoying red tape (such as having to save and run a command to see error messages) take a toll on motivation and attention
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relevant, so that they can immediatelly build something that is interesting and interacts with their world
In this particular case, I decided to make it as easy as possible for them to
program their very own Telegram bot. Using a web-based editor environment,
there is no setup to worry about. Live code checking means that at least
obvious syntax error are caught before they try to press “Deploy”. And already
with very very simple programming skills (if, string comparison) the kids can
write, for example, elaborate interactive fiction.
To that end, I created pybotbrain. This is a service running on the internet
that can host any number Telegram bots (i.e. it receives messages to these bots, and responds to them). It allows the “owners” of these bot to program the inner logic of the bot very effortless with the browser, as the following screenshots show.
The bots are programmed in Python, using a very simple programming interface, so that even with rudimentary programming skills, interesting bots can be written.
| Interaction with a bot | The web interface |
|---|---|
 |
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To react to a private message, define a function
def private_message(sender, text). If you return a string, it will become the bot’s response. -
To react to a group message, define a function
def group_message(sender, text). If you return a string, it will become the bot’s response. -
You can remember things in the
memorydictionary.
Yes you can!
- Open a Chat with @PybotbrainBot
- Send
/newbotto @BotFather - Answer the questions to pick a name etc.
- @BotFather will tell you the Bot’s token, which looks like
110201543:AAHdqTcvCH1vGWJxfSeofSAs0K5PALDsaw. Send that to @PybotbrainBot (you can just forward the whole message) - Now talk to your bot, and say
/login - Go to https://bot.nomeata.de/admin/ to login and get started!
Of course, if you already have a Telegram bot, and you want to control it with this, just send its token to @PybotbrainBot
Sure! You do not even need a server for it, just an Amazon WebServices
account, and it will very likely run well within the free tier. See
./Building.md for (very rough) instructions.
Sure! Some things on the TODO list are:
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Write target-audience compatibe documentation
Some first steps are in
docs/ -
Make this safer to run
- Find the minimal AWS policy for the backend Lambda function.
- Improve the sandbox for the Python execution (see discussion in
./Sandboxing.md)
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Prettier UI
In particular, make the editor window take the full available vertical space. Maybe switching from Bulma to a more modern, flexbox-based CSS framework might make that easier.
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Error handling
In particular in the UI.
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Sensible polling for events and memory changes
The Frontend should use not always download the full list of events, but only those that are new since the last one.
Events should probably have a DynamoDB-based time-to-live.
Memory polling could be done with a ETag-like mechanism.
Polling should stop when UI is in a background tab.
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Rewrite the backend in a different language, now that the Python sandboxing is its own process, and thus the backend is completely independent of Python.
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Carefully adding capabilities to the bot
This will never expose the full complexity of the Telegram Bot API. The goal is to teach programming and allow the kids to do many fun and interesting and useful things – not necessarily all the things.
That said, a careful extension of the capabilities, especially if they don’t make the first steps more complicated, are useful. Especially important features like “sending stickers”.