COVID-6ix

COVID-6ix is a tool that gathers and presents GTA-related COVID-19 statistics in an organized manner.

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Inspiration

Since this hackathon is based in Toronto, I was inspired to build something that would be relevant and useful to members of the GTA. When this hackathon started, I had just completed learning the basics of HTML and Flask, so I wanted to incorporate these two subjects in my project. I decided on building a website and decided that the problem this website would fix is the lack of organized info regarding GTA COVID-19 statistics.

What it does

My project gathers data from covid-19.ontario.ca regarding the regions of GTA and presents the information in tables on a website.

How I built it

I built this project using Python and one of its plugins, Selenium, to act as a web scraper to gather and store all the relevant data. Afterwards, I used Flask and designed multiple HTML pages which would then be used to display the previously gathered data in an easy-to-read table format.

Challenges I ran into

I had a good amount of trouble when building the Selenium web scraper. Since it was only my second time experimenting with Selenium, it took lots of time for me to grab all the elements and figure out a way to efficiently store the information. Another challenge I had was with building the various HTML pages. I came into this project only knowing the bare minimum of Flask and HTML, so attempting to develop an entire website definitely took a lot of time.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm most proud of my website's design, I am happy with the design I created in the short amount of time I had, especially since this was my first time building my own website. Overall, I'm proud that despite this being my first hackathon, I was able to come up with an idea that can benefit others and was actually able to create an entire project based on this idea.

What we learned

I learned a lot about web scraping and the different ways I can access elements and the element's text and style. Furthermore, I learned a lot about HTML and Flask and building websites in general.

What's next for COVID-6ix

With more time, I plan to make my website mobile-friendly so it looks nice on mobile devices. This will be beneficial to the project since so many people use phones and tablets over computers nowadays.

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