covidgamesachack

Inspiration

Pushing back against QAnon! In a less satirical tone(however necessary the above statement may actually be), we wanted to challenge ourselves in an environment welcoming new ideas and to provide something that could be used as a tool for teaching or a game for understanding how COVID could be combated.

What it does

Display infection count per state by date since early 2020's. As the time draws closer to the present, the counts should increase significantly.

How we built it

In python with a mix of new (to us) libraries:

Dash
plotly

Challenges we ran into

Everything, lol. We had next to no experience in every single library we used so we taught ourselves every step of the way. We spent probably easily 80% of our time reading and understanding library documentation.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Everything! We got further than we expected. Honestly, we viewed this as 1 giant learning experience. None of us have worked in teams this size before on a project of this magnitude. Being able to work as a team and power through the struggles of everyone hitting a wall at the same time is excruciating. And yet, we still kept working!

Did we get as far as we originally hoped? Nope, and that's okay! It's an opportunity for each of us to keep growing as programmers.

What we learned

It's extremely convenient to have a clear-cut idea with steps already laid out... That would remove much of the challenge, but sometimes you just need to get things done rather than challenge yourself; You often have to code for the sake of work.

We primarily learned the new libraries listed above, however I would say we still only skimmed the very edge of their potential.

What's next for covidgamesachack

Thanking each other for working hard and committing the weekend to this Hackathon. Will we see each other again? Maybe, but it was still a great memory for all of us as this was each of our first Hackathon!