Degrees of Change

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✨ Inspiration

When we began drafting ideas for this hackathon, our team really wanted to focus on tackling real-world problems. We wanted to create a platform that helped users fully realize the issues that our world was facing. After some deliberation, we decided to analyze and display climate change data. By visualizing the data in a simpler format, it allows users to get a better understanding of the areas in Canada that are affected by climate change.

🌎 What it does

Degrees of Change is a React app that elegantly displays climate change data in Canada. With its toggles and slider, users can effortlessly view climate data in Canada over the years. The app has a main landing page that gives a brief introduction, as well as some information on climate change, before directing them to the hands-on information display. As you move the slider, the user can see the global temperatures rising and falling on our 3-dimensional diagram, which is displayed on a moveable map of Canada.

🔨 How we built it

Our team drafted the designs for Degrees of Change using Figma and brought the front-end designs into reality through React and Typescript. We wanted to keep the front-end minimalistic to let the data speak for itself. For the backend, we used SQLite with Flask to analyze the climate change dataset provided by the Government of Canada. The data was then presented using Deck.gl to bring a simple map of Canada to life.

🥊 Challenges we ran into

Although our team has experienced a few hackathons in the past, we still faced some unique challenges during Hack the 6ix. For our team, it found it challenging as it was our first time taking on a full-stack role during this hackathon. We explored unfamiliar frameworks to complete this project. Although we faced many challenges with the frameworks, it was ultimately incredibly rewarding to see your hard work pay off into a fully-fledged app.

🏆 Accomplishments that we're proud of

Overall our team is quite proud of the work that we have done in this hackathon. We were able to successfully learn and apply new applications such as Deck.gl. Learning and using these new tools allowed us to create a better visual component of our project, which helped to elevate the purpose of our project, which is to allow users to explore climate change data.

🧠 What we learned

As mentioned before, we stepped outside of our comfort zone and decided to tackle some unfamiliar frameworks for our hackathon project. Some of our members have not worked with full stack projects before. We are all very proud of how far we’ve come and how much we have learned during this hackathon. Each of us will walk away having learned something new while also being eager to incorporate it into our next project. This hackathon proved to be an immense learning experience as we gained insights into future tools that can be used to develop future projects.

🚀 What's next for Degrees of Change

Given more time, we hope to expand the scope of the app to cover more countries, ultimately leading to an app that provides information on climate change around the entire world. One of the first steps would be to gather more datasets to provide information outside of Canada. We could also add more functionality to the user interface, to provide a more enriching experience for the user as we provide a more in-depth look into the statistics. Another future direction includes adding in different data science techniques. Through the analysis of the time-series data along with additional information such as current global activities (carbon emissions), we could build a predictive model to project for future temperatures. In addition setting up an interface for business/researchers to submit there own climate data and to predict future conditions given a set of changeable parameters would create a viable business product to sold as a service.