Crossing Cultures

Crossing Cultures Logo

Inspiration

As many of us in the group immigrated to Canada, we believe that the transition between cultures can be tough, so we wanted to create a solution to ease this transition for international students. We dubbed the project "Crossing Cultures", and decided to make a MRU chapters for the Hackathon. This version of the site specifically caters to Arabic Students. We hope Crossing Cultures can make the TRANSITION between cultures a seamless process!

What it does

This website is designed to provide information and resources for Arab students transitioning to Canada and specifically, to Mount Royal University. Crossing Cultures is a website that has information regarding cultural etiquette, international support groups at MRU, and language learning resources. The pride and joy of our site is the maps to the nearest Mosque (a place of religious worship for Muslims) and chatbot that answers Arabic questions into English.

How we built it

We used HTML, CSS, and some Javascript to create a visually and interactive website.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we faced was having to learn HTML and CSS without any previous experience to develop the website. The time limit of the Hackathon was also a challenging factor.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

-Coding our first fully functional website -Completing our first coding project as a group -Learning HTML and CSS from scratch -Implementing a chatbot after 12 hours of effort -creating a sick logo

What we learned

We learned many new things that are useful for web development such as CSS for web design and Procreate for logo design. We also gained some experience working with AWS to create a chatbot for the site. For most of our members, this was our first group coding project. We felt that through the Hackathon, we learned more about cooperation in group work and diving up tasks. Overall, we found our experience coding in these 24 hours was an overall success.

What's next for Crossing Cultures

Crossing Cultures aims to update the site to cater to many more international students. We hope to eventually expand chapters to other universities in hopes to help more students. Crossing Cultures will continue bridge the gap between cultures, one step at a time.