Team Rico Rescuers: Aadiba, Andrea, Chamles, Kim, Olivia
Tracks: Water and Beginner
Inspiration
Natural disasters are common due to climate change. Islands like Puerto Rico are more vulnerable to floods and hurricanes. Recently, Fiona hit Puerto Rico, causing serious damage and isolating entire villages. We want to help Puerto Rico better recover, building a more resilient community.
Our inspiration was our teammate who has family in Puerto Rico and wants to help them better recover from the hurricane by providing shelter information, items needed, etc. Her family could not communicate with their family in Puerto Rico because of power outages. Instead, her family turned to sites like Facebook and Google and searched for photos of their family’s neighborhoods to see what their situation was like. It would have been much easier to have a centralized gallery of all these photos and information.
What it does
Our website will be a centralized location for all of photos of Puerto Rico, so that when people can not call their loved ones to see if they are okay and how they were impacted by the hurricane, they can instead visit our site, search for their town or neighborhood, and view photos and information about the damages in that specific area.
Our website also allows you to find shelters near you, ask for or offer necessary items, and find hotlines for immediate help! You can also sign up to volunteer, donate, or just learn more!
How we built it
We used an iPad to brainstorm our designs and then we visualized it as a website using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in Replit (a website we can code together). Eventually, we came up with a prototype using Google Sites and a Wix homepage, using Javascript within Velo.
Challenges we ran into
First, we tried to build it in Wix Velo but found difficulty coding inside the application without familiarity with it. When trying to build the website from scratch, we weren't able to build a functional and visually-pleasing website as our team was very new to web dev.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of our working prototype and our Wix/Velo homepage, which we were able to implement in Javascript.
What we learned
We learned how difficult it is for people outside of Puerto Rico to contact their loved ones as there is a lack of connection to Puerto Ricans during these disasters.
We learned skills in CSS, HTML, and Javascript (with Velo by Wix), which most of us had never used before. We learned about web design, databases, and how to connect front-end and back-end code. As it was our first hackathon, it was a great learning experience.
What's next for Connect Puerto
We will promote our website, making it widely known so that we get as many photos, volunteers, and item sharing as possible. We hope to deliver supplies to Puerto Ricans in need and open more weather shelters in underserved areas. In the future, we can implement a drone that will take photos of different parts of Puerto Rico and upload them to our website, since power outages will make it hard for those without generators to upload photos.
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