Carbon Footprint Collab

A project which provides a carbon footprint calculator that extends to a large community of people.

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Inspiration

While searching for ways to use technology to help the environment, I found an abundance of carbon footprint calculators that were both too complicated and lacked the ability to see how what you are doing affects others.

What it does

It is a simple carbon calculator that combines numbers with all other users in order to create a more meaningful and comprehensive view of carbon emissions

How we built it

I build it using React javascript for the frontend alongside html and css. For the backend, I used pythons Flask framework and integrated it with the MongoDB atlas database

Challenges we ran into

With this being my first web application, javascript heavy project, react project, Flask project and Mongodb project I found accomplishing almost any task to be difficult as I was forced to learn while I was developing the project. Out of all of these challenges I found the user authentication gave me the most trouble because it was the first problem I tried to tackle first meaning I had almost zero knowledge of how to handle it at first.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Being my first web application, I was proud that I was able to accomplish my goals. I was also able to include a basic animation and user authentication all while making the application appealing visually

What we learned

This was my first time ever using React and mongoDB and my first javascript, html, css web application. So I became more proficient in all of them. While I have done a good amount of work in Python, this was my first time ever using Flask.

What's next for Carbon Footprint Collab

I hope to make it a larger platform. First I will include more metrics for carbon footprint calculations, while also giving the user the option to only engage in the simpler aspects of it. I plan to incorporate machine learning to give the user suggestions to help improve the user's ability to help the environment while optimizing these suggestions based on the user's updates to their own carbon and environmental metrics. I next would like to broaden beyond simply carbon emission, but other environmental concerns. Finally, I would like to add a social component to the web application so users can work more closely together to help the environment.

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