Welcome back! In the previous lesson, we explored the importance of a robust system prompt and how it guides the behavior of our personal tutor. Now, we will delve into the next step of our journey: building the Session Manager. This lesson will focus on the model layer of the MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture, which is crucial for organizing and managing data in a structured way. The SessionManager class will be the core component of our model layer, responsible for managing tutoring session data effectively. By the end of this lesson, you will understand how to create, manage, and retrieve session data using the SessionManager class.

The SessionManager class is designed to handle the storage and management of tutoring session data. It serves as the backbone of our tutor's data management system. We'll start by setting up the class and then gradually add methods to handle session creation, message addition, and conversation retrieval.

Let's begin by defining the SessionManager class and its initialize method. The initialize method sets up an empty hash, @sessions, which will eventually store all session data.

At this stage, @sessions is just an empty hash. As we add sessions, it will become a nested hash structure, where the first key is the student_id, and the second key is the session_id. This allows us to efficiently manage multiple tutoring sessions for different students.

Here’s an example of what the @sessions hash will look like after some sessions and messages have been added:

In this structure:

• The top-level keys are student_ids (e.g., "student_001").

Next, we'll add the core methods to our SessionManager class: creating a session, retrieving a session, adding messages, and retrieving the full conversation.

With these methods, we've built a fully functional SessionManager class that can create and manage tutoring sessions, add messages, and retrieve conversation histories.

Now, let's see how to use the SessionManager class in practice. We'll walk through creating a session, adding messages, and retrieving the conversation.

In this example, we:

• Load the system prompt.
• Initialize a SessionManager instance.
• Create a new tutoring session for a student.
• Add a student message and an assistant response.
• Retrieve and display the full conversation, including the system prompt and all messages.

This workflow demonstrates how the SessionManager class ties together session creation, message management, and conversation retrieval.

In this lesson, we explored the SessionManager class and its role in managing tutoring session data within the model layer of our application. We learned how to create and manage sessions, add messages, and retrieve conversation histories. The SessionManager is a crucial component for organizing session data, ensuring that our personal tutor can handle multiple tutoring sessions efficiently.

As you move on to the practice exercises, take the opportunity to experiment with modifying and extending the SessionManager functionality. This hands-on practice will reinforce the concepts covered in this lesson and prepare you for the next steps in our course. Keep up the great work, and I look forward to seeing your progress!