Inspiration
After chatting about a number of real-world issues, we settled on creating something to address environmental issues. One of our members has an interest in urban planning, and an aspect of that is how current typical suburbs with sprawling lawns directly inhibit biodiversity due to monocultural grass lawns. After a brief, but (I assure you) thrilling lecture on that, we realized that online resources regarding that topic were scattered and text-heavy. Because of this, we decided to develop Native Lawn.
What it does
Our site serves as a one-stop resource for learning about the cons of lawns, and what alternatives are available. Planting native plants encourages biodiversity and diminishes the need for watering, pesticide use, and other resource-reliant or damaging tools. Native plants vary greatly by area, even only within the U.S.A., so our site provides a visual guide to what lawn alternatives are native to where, via an interactive map. Further details on how to swap and curate your lawn are then provided, with Native Lawn acting as an every-step guide to swapping your lawn.
How we built it
Our website is a basic HTML and CSS website on GitHub. This was the obvious choice since HTML and CSS are well documented and easy to work with. We didn't really use GitHub to its fullest, since one Trinity was handling most of the website code, but in the future, it would doubtless be necessary for maintaining the website.
Challenges we ran into
To build our interactive map, we struggled to find a quick way to do this—eventually settling on an API. Finding an API that would serve our needs (without costing much) was a challenge.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
This is the first hackathon for all group members and we are all proud of participating. We are proud of being able to utilize and show off our abilities at coding. And we are proud of creating something that we think can help the environment.
What we learned
We learned how hackathons are structured, and what to expect going into them. We learned how having the ability to create a full stack application is desirable, as most of our talents lie in the back end.
What's next for Native Lawn
Presently, Native Lawn's content is limited to the US. Ideally, we would expand this to a global scale. Additionally, we'd like to increase the amount of informational content on our site, while mixing in the use of images and infographics to avoid large blocks of text.
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