Inspiration
For as long as we can remember, climate change has always been a serious issue. We all hear about it on the news and from our teachers and educators. The temperature is rising, sea levels are rising, and the amazon is burning. More prolonged intense droughts threaten crops, wildlife, and freshwater supplies. From polar bears to marine turtles, our planet's diversity of life is at risk from the changing climate. But beyond just the wildlife, we, as human beings, are also at risk. In just the United States alone, about 40% of the population lives in or near coastal cities, the kind of cities most affected by climate change and rising sea levels. From all of this, we at Team Three Star came up with the idea to create the Climate Time Chamber. The Climate Time Chamber is a website that simulates different possible futures. The user can adjust various settings and see how their decisions affect the world around them. Our intention when creating the Climate Time Chamber is to raise awareness about climate change and connect people who want to learn more with resources and information.
What it does
The first and central feature of The Climate Time Chamber is to simulate different possible futures. You can move five different sliders representing various economic sectors that contribute to global emissions. Each slider is weighed differently in close relation to its real-life counterparts. This means the energy sector has more influence on the outcome than the buildings sector. By clicking simulate, you will get a different future depending on what you choose for the emission levels for each sector. This simulation feature lets you easily visualize how the future will turn out if we don't do anything about this global emergency. The user is then presented with a future that reflects their choice.
Challenges we ran into
As an emerging group, we had our fair shares of challenges and difficulties: We did not know where to start. This was probably the biggest challenge we had. We were given so much freedom and broad choices for our project that we could not immediately agree on what to work on, and we even had to scrap some project initiates and ideas along the way. Not every member of our group was familiar with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which led to some members having to familiarize themselves with a new language in 36 hours. Our group's last challenge was trying to have a finished product within this time frame. Although we were able to implement our ideas and designs, we could have definitely made something more polished given more time.
What we learned
We learned a lot about web development through this process and have come to appreciate all the hard work that goes into making a website both functional and have a great design.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.