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Title Card
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Our Initiative
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About Us
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Inclusivity
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Ways to Contribute
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Thank you!
Smart Cities/Urban Planning
Inspiration
We wanted to create a website for an organization that works to promote cleanliness and recycling in Pittsburgh. We would be a non-profit organization that works with neighborhoods for funding. Our site would promote friendly competition between the neighborhoods to clean up and maintain cleanliness. Also, we wanted to include a way to give back to the community by offering prizes for the top scorers and top neighborhood such as gift cards to local restaurants, tickets to local museums, a buss pass, a neighborhood movie night, and free snacks. There are a lot of initiatives to encourage cleaning up Pittsburgh, but we wanted to create something that would give incentive for residents to keep their city clean.
What it does
A user would log in and track their current progress in cleaning the city. They can access the individual leaderboard as well as the neighborhood leaderboard to monitor their ranking. The site also shows upcoming neighborhood clean-up events through a Google Calendar API. It also features an About Us section for participants to gain more insight on our project and why it's important. Participants are able to contact us through an email form.
How we built it
We built our flask app using mostly HTML/CSS and Python. We started with a design and some intended features for the site, and then we built the site around these requirements.
Challenges we ran into
From making GitHub work to integrating a Google Calendar API, we faced many challenges. Most of this was new to us, so there was a large learning curve we had to overcome. The API proved to be a simple idea that was causing a lot of errors. However, one of our team members was able to figure it out and get our API working!
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are very proud of the overall design of the site. We put a lot of thought and adjustment into the design as well as the color scheme. Also, we are extremely proud of being able to include the Google Calendar API where we created a Google account and some events to appear on the site. Another element we are proud of is our consideration of inclusivity. Some residents may not have access to the internet, so we considered how we could still involve them. We decided to create neighborhood clean up events where anyone from the neighborhood could participate, sign in, and be recorded as a contributor which means if their neighborhood wins, they will benefit from the prize! In order to get the word out about the clean up events, we have an events page which uses the Google Calendar API, and we would put up fliers around the neighborhood.
What we learned
There was so much that we learned throughout this project. Some team members learned HTML for the first time while others strengthened their skillset and discovered new things they could do. Also, we learned how to incorporate APIs into our work, and we learned how to use and navigate GitHub. Because of our project's initiative, we were able to learn more about why recycling is so important and what kind of organizations are already in place in Pittsburgh to promote cleanliness.
What's next for Clean City
In future iterations of Clean City, we would like to include more neighborhoods. Currently, we only have three neighborhoods: Homewood, South Oakland, and Hill District. Also, we would like to create a mobile app to go along with the website.
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