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The Bend Your FootPrint logo
💡 Inspiration In today's world, it is more crucial than ever to prioritize reducing your carbon footprint. The impact of human activities on the environment is becoming increasingly apparent, and carbon emissions are one of the leading contributors to climate change. When deciding to cut down on harmful practices that increase carbon emissions, it is often easy to overlook some of them as they are so heavily integrated into our daily routine. However, with Bend Your Footprint, our Carbon Emission Calculator makes that process seamless. Our all-in-one website is a repository for anyone who is interested in making their life a more eco-conscious one, as well as links to several other resources so you can make an informed and educated change in your life.
🔍 What it does As soon as the user enters our website, they will be greeted with an interactive page that invites them to take on our Carbon Emission calculator. Once redirected, the user will be invited to click our button to partake in our interactive quiz. This quiz will appear as a pop up on the user’s webpage. At the end of the quiz, the user will receive their very own personal Bend Your Footprint carbon emission score, which they can compare with our pre-determined ranges and make a detailed choice on how they can cut down on their carbon emissions. Furthermore, we have additional webpages that the user can explore to learn how to get started on Bending their Footprint!
⚙️ How we built it We designed the quiz program using Python and made use of a lot of object-oriented principles within the quiz. Furthermore, the front-end was created through a combination of HTML, CSS, and Javascript. We used HubSpot CRM in order to host our website. The current interactive quiz displayed on our calculator page was created by utilizing the tool TypeForm. This enabled us to utilize their Responses API and access the data that users submitted. Moreover, we used domain.com to register our domain name!
🚧 Challenges we ran into As this was all the members’ first hackathon, there were a lot of challenges with mapping our ideas for Bend Your Footprint into code. For instance, we wanted to completely design and implement the pop-up quiz currently displayed onto the website completely on our own using the help of REST API’s and JSON databases. We were interested in using HTTP requests in order to access our Python program and connect both the client and server side of our project. Some of our teammates were not familiar in some areas of back-end and front-end, hence this was also a huge learning experience for most of us in a 2-day span!
✔️ Accomplishments that we're proud of We are proud of having a project that we finished and quickly adapting our business plan when experiencing roadblocks. We are also proud to have overcome the hundreds of error that were thrown our way in an attempt to make our website and calculator as accessible and interactive for our users, whether it be online using our interactive quiz, or offline by installing the program and running it locally. Some of our teammates also tackled front-end for the first time, and we are extremely pleased by how smooth it was for them, this project has definitely given us a more diverse skillset and allowed us to work and problem solve as a team.
📚 What we learned Front-end development, integrating external plug-ins and tools onto our website, stronger skillset of object-oriented programming using Python and learning how to use HubSpot! We also learned a number of problem-solving skills and learned how to unite as a team when we experience any errors or roadblocks. Splitting tasks and taking a leadership role was also new for some of our teammates so this gave us more confidence in taking initiative in a group setting.
🔭 What's next for Bend Your Footprint We aim to hone our current skillset and implement our own interactive quiz by utilizing API’s and JSON requests with the help of Python frameworks. This way, we will have our very own quiz and have more flexibility with the questions being displayed as well as making the quiz a more fun and unique solution for our environment. Additionally, we also aim to expand and diversify our current catalogue of tools (such as the calculator) and venture into new areas of solving our increasing carbon footprint. As with the theme of this hackathon, the very first idea that we wanted to implement into our quiz was Avatar themed questions and games, which we hope to implement in the future as our learning of full stack develops.
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