bots-as-digital-infrapunctures/content/Section 6 - Critical Interventions Through Bots (exercise)/1-introduction.md

Title: Critical Interventions through Bots (exercise)
Slug: 01-s6-step-1
Date: 2020-11-01 12:00
Summary: Start of the bot-making excercise.

In this last section of the module we will make a bot. 🤖

We will use the dialog writing exercise and transform it into a bot ([in case you haven't done it yet, it is recommended to go through this section first](/category/http://localhost:8000/category/section-5-infrapunctural-imaginaries-exercise.html)).

Before we dive into bot-making, we will first look into the **materiality of bots**: How do they operate? What code is needed to make a bot? And how does a bot connect to an infrastructure, both in a technical and dialogical way?

Then we will explore bots from a computational and technical point of view. We will go through a couple of basic features of **programming logic**, such as loops, if/else statements and variables. It will help us to get a better understanding of the technical mechanisms behind these automated agents.

After that, we will look at the code of an **example bot**, to study how other bot-makers write and operate them.

And lastly, we will finish this module by **making a bot** ourselves.