ACCD: Awareness of Climate Change Denial

Inspiration

One of our members has recently been introduced to a wide variety of issues surrounding climate change and it raised his awareness of how unaware he truly was when it comes to the climate crisis. Realizing this, he wondered how unaware the people who genuinely don't believe that climate change is a serious issue would be. This app was created from the motivation to keep in mind that we can always be more aware about our world and that it is our responsibility to make sure our fellow humans are leaving a safe and hospitable planet for our posterity.

What it does

We created a web app showcasing recent tweets that spread misinformation, conspiracy theories, and unsubstantiated claims.

How we built it

We used web scraping software to get metadata from Twitter, pushed said data into a Natural Language Processing Classification Machine Learning model to identify whether it was speaking for or against climate change, and then stored the resulting values in a MySQL database, to be called and displayed on our locally hosted website.

Challenges we ran into

Some issues we ran into were:

Setting up a database on Heroku
Integrating database queries and ML model with Flask
Finding an up to date and functional web scraping library

Accomplishments that we're proud of

1) Successfully completing our minimum viable project 2) Integrating a variety of technologies with our first experience with them (Flask, Heroku, Python) 3) Finishing well within the time constraints

What we learned

1) The power of version management (GitHub) 2) How efficient a good team can be when they work parallelly 3) We all got experience with new technologies 4) How to integrate technologies, and the challenges that may arise during the process