4K HACC 2022

Accessing our App

To access and use the application you can visit it at https://aabhacc.powerappsportals.com/. The credentials have been sent to George Lee on slack. To access the technical part of the application, you must log into https://make.powerapps.com/ and use the same credentials, then change the environment (in the top right) to 'All About Broadband'. Scroll down on the home page to the environment's apps, and edit the HACC22 Power Pages application.

Inspiration

Our group was drawn in by UH's All About Broadband project as it felt most relevant to what we wanted to pursue in the future. Our approach to the topic ended up taking the standpoint of 'security' and protecting yourself online as we felt this was the most important thing to understand as first time, or unfamiliar users to the internet. We wanted to emphasize how to be safe and ensure user information is secure.

What it does

SafetyOnline is a website that will act as a digital navigator for its users to understand where to start and what to avoid on their journey to establishing an online presence. It emphasizes how to keep yourself secure and ensure your private information stays private. The website will highlight what to avoid doing online, such as avoiding scams. It will also show users how the internet reaches Hawai'i to become more familiar with it, instead of keeping it as a mysterious presence that's in the clouds. Users can take a survey to show their understanding of the internet, and the responses saved can be used to change what information is present on the site so that more overshadowed topics can become more apparent.

How we built it

We solely used Microsoft PowerPages to make the website.

Challenges we ran into

Microsoft PowerPages is understandably limited in what it can do for users unfamiliar with web development, so creating or moving properties we wanted to implement proved to be difficult if it did not fall within PowerPages drag-and-drop functionality. An example of this is an idea we had at the beginning of the project that we were unable to implement at the time of Technical review, where upon completing the knowledge survey the user would get dynamic feedback based on their answers (through a redirected page ideally). As our team started with almost no web development understanding, we weren't able to learn how to get to the point where we could edit the code itself (a feature offered by PowerApps) to create this kind of function, along with other interactive features we wanted to implement.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that with the time given and balance between work/classes/HACC we were still able to deliver a project that reflected what we wanted to make. We all became a lot more familiar with no code software and spent time learning how to use PowerApps, not just PowerPages but other services offered as we tried to explore what we could do with the subscription.

What we learned

Aside from the technical aspects of creating our solution, we became more familiar with the environment and mindsets necessary to work on a team. As students, our projects and assignments thus far have been entirely solo work, and HACC gave us the opportunity to see what group-orientated projects were like. Things such as discussing what we want the app to do, look like, and even when we were available to work are much harder and take longer than what we initially expected. Additionally, facing disappointment of our own lack of tools and understanding became something we had to accept and move on with for the sake of learning from it and improving ourselves to avoid the same feelings.

What's next for 4K HACC 2022

Ideally, we want to implement the aforementioned function of dynamic form feedback. We want to also expand on topics such as scams and social media presence, and add new topics relevant to keeping yourself safe. We want to keep learning so we can eventually manipulate a website to reflect what we want it to look like, removing the need for low/no code and having a more accurate representation of our ideas.

Built With

• powerapps
• powerpages