Clear Currents

Inspiration

When we were first introduced to the topic, we instantly thought of the prevalent water crisis here in Canada. While we do believe it is important to strive for a sustainable world, we believe educating our community first is a necessary step to achieving this goal. Furthermore, in this generation, media is the most powerful gateway to spreading information. Therefore, by combining these two concepts we hope to create a practical and relevant solution to the prompt.

What it does

The aim of the website is to entice users to learn about Canada’s water crisis and its impact on indigenous communities including rural areas. This is done through interactive games to involve the community in a meaningful way, while implicitly supporting our cause through every engagement. To be able to raise more awareness an NGO that is heavily involved in the indigenous community has been chosen to be included on the website to showcase its direct impact on this issue. We are able to combine their initiatives to inspire others to take action and contribute to a positive change.

How we built it

For our planning phase, we began with pseudocode and diagrams of how we would like our website and games to look to help visualize and manage our time more wisely to ensure that we are able to deliver a final product. By practicing modular programming we were able to keep our workspace clean and organized for a smooth and effective collaboration. In our project, we utilized AI to improve our efficiency and educate us through the learning process of creating a functional final product that would be appealing and educating to the users.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges we faced with our project was managing collaborative code so that we could all simultaneously work without having to worry about code clashing. We ended up using the LiveShare functionality on VScode, which made this process very manageable. Furthermore, the main scope of our project is on web development, and we previously had little to no experience, so we had to build the project while simultaneously learning more about various languages such as HTML, JavaScript and CSS. Finally, we were also challenged to complete this project in only 24 hours, which was incredibly challenging, as we had to go through all of the design phases, from brainstorming our ideas to pitching our final product.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of presenting a fully functional interactive web page created in just 24 hours, with two mini-games, an educational page, and direct linkage to Water First donation and informational page. We also managed to collaborate with minimal conflicts and disagreements, while successfully managing our timeline with periodic checkpoints, and well-established roles, between game development and web development, to easily reach our goal.

What we learned

This opportunity has allowed us to learn many new skills and gain valuable experience on how to successfully tackle a problem. On a technical level, we learned how to apply our theoretical knowledge in a practical setting, which allowed us to further develop our solving abilities. We were motivated to incorporate previously known and new languages such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in order to create user-friendly web solutions. This also helped use AI to its fullest potential, integrating its capabilities throughout parts of the project. Overall learning how to stay motivated in a stressful and competitive environment equips us with the tools needed to succeed in future scenarios.

What's next for Clear Currents

In the future, we hope to expand our horizons beyond Canada and create a global impact. Clear Currents hopes to collaborate with a multitude of charities to widespread this vision on a social level. From a technical standpoint, we hope to continuously improve our user interface and release new games to help achieve this goal.