Chavigator

A navigator to finding charities. When you go to the site, you will look at statics around America then choose a state to look through their local charities.

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Inspiration

Our inspiration was current events. We are very passionate about educating and helping others the most we can. We wanted to build a project that would allow others to learn from our website and then use that information to help others. A lot of people don't donate because they don't know where to start or what the biggest issues are. We wanted to create a website to be efficient enough that people would only use our website to find charities.

What it does

Our website has a map with a drop bar for statistics. People can choose a statistic of their choice and a new color-coded map will appear. They can look over these trends to see if they're interested in a certain problem. The user can click anywhere on the map and see a list of charities in that city. If they are focused on a certain issue, they can use the search bar to shorten their list.

How we built it

We broke our project up into sections. This was both of our first hackathon projects and we were not sure how to plan. Danny began on the basics for the website, while Alex looked for APIs that we could use. Neither of us are front-end developers nor do we have experience with nodejs, so Alex started early on the get requests and had to get help. During that time, Danny continued to work on the style and adding the image map into the code. Once we got the requests to work we were able to piece everything back together using Github.

Challenges we ran into

We faced a lot of issues with the get requests, and they took up a majority of our time since we kept getting errors we had never seen before. We also encountered some front-end syntax issues that we needed to figure out. The biggest issue we faced was not getting API_keys. A lot of our plans couldn't be executed because we didn't have access to APIs in time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have a functioning project. This is our first hackathon project and we wanted to step out of our comfort zone; even though it was really hard, we are proud of our overall project. When we began the hackathon we were nervous we wouldn't be able to finish in time since we wanted to incorporate so many new skills, but because of all the workshops and help from the mentors, we were able to get it mostly done.

What we learned

We learned a lot of skills from building our project and also in the workshops. We were both able to learn how to use GitHub commands and the desktop version better. Because of our project we were able to learn more HTML and CSS better. We both had to completely learn JavaScript, nodeJS, jQuery, AJAX, and APIs from scratch. After doing a lot of different work with these tools we have a way better understanding of what these tools do and offer.

What's next for Chavigator

We plan to continue this project after the hackathon. We were both very passionate about this project and want to see it succeed. Before we add new resources and data we need to get access to more API_keys. Once we have those available we want to create our own map of America and have it change color with the chosen statistics, rather than the current picture version now. We would also like to add another search feature so people can add more to their search queries.

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