Inspiration
Our main inspiration for this project was the trends we have seen in media coverage since we have been able to use the internet. People tend to be more evasive when it comes to these important topics, especially when it is not directly affecting them. This in turn takes attention away from the importance of certain topics for more disingenuous topics. Our goal was to make a user-friendly website that people can use to keep up with the events that really do need our attention. Where they can also give personal context and help people understand the gravity of these situations for people who are actually being affected by the things happening around the globe.
What it does
Our project has a user-friendly, interactive map that when a country on the map is clicked it will direct the user to that specific page allowing them to scroll through the most current events, both written by other users and publishers, under the topics of environment, politics, and societal issues. The user also has the opportunity to click on a link provided for articles that come from other websites. There is also a submissions tab where individuals are encouraged to submit their own current events and the effects they are having in real time. These submissions would be fact checked and hopefully bring more real-world context to so many of the conflicts we view online.
How we built it
Our home page has an interactive map where each country acts as its own button tied to a page for that country built using a bootstrap template and our own knowledge of html, CSS and JavaScript. The user can also go into the submissions tab and submit their own current event which will be tied to a class including their name, email, phone number, and the event they wish to have published. This information will then be used to contact us where we can review it and publish it through the referenced country’s specific page pending fact checking.
Challenges we ran into
We started off under the assumption that we needed a front and back end for creating our website in order to make it work, which meant that over 5 hours was put in for a couple members to learn how do the most basic work in django attempting to make a usable skeleton. We then realized we could make it without and that may produce a better result since we were trying to learn so much information at once in order to actually make a workable product.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We learned about how we can use bootstrap templates to make our experience designing a website so much easier. We also got a lot more experience coding in html where only one of us had known how to do that before. Two of us had never touched JavaScript, html, or CSS before so we were able to broaden our knowledge in that sense as well. None of us had ever participated in a hackathon or had done much coding related to user interfaces prior and this helped us experience what that was like, and how we could problem solve to find a solution to the problems we ran into along the way.
What we learned
We learned that we should try to think about the simpler solutions for our ideas and not just run with the first thing that comes to mind. We learned that we like coding for fun and that learning things, while incredibly stressful while on a deadline, can be incredibly rewarding when you figure something out when you didn't know before.
What's next for Current Events
Hopefully adding more than 9 workable countries to the map, or adding a back end so that we can do more heavily structured data configurations and possibly add more working parts to the website as a whole.
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