Inspiration
As we are growing our coding skills and our knowledge, the numbers of endangered plants has increased. Currently, 16,306 of the 41,415 species on the IUCN Red List are in danger of going extinct.
While organizations all across the world are striving to conserve the environment, we discovered that the youth contained the long-term solutions. They make up over one-quarter of the world's population and will be the future leaders and decision-makers, thus it is vital to involve and empower them to take local and global action to protect wildlife.
What it does
“Living wild species are like a library of books still unread. Our heedless destruction of them is akin to burning that library without ever reading its books.”
- John Dingell
The idea for building a virtual museum came to us as a way to inform children and give them a place to look for solutions. Similar to the quote, it expresses a social statement that our actions burn the “books” (endanger animals) we never saw. In the future, what would be left is a digital memento of what we have lost.
The youth can launch the virtual museum through the website, navigate around and click on books to view information about the animals. Afterwards, they can learn more about what they can do through the website and connect to their local wildlife organizations by applying on the website form. The team would then connect the youth and they can start their environmental movement.
How we built it
We discussed and brainstormed through google documents and planned our task blocks using Taskade. While the three of us experimented with our coding languages and applications, Michelle collected data on the different endangered animals, their habitat, diet, causes of extinction and methods to aid the issue. This is because each animal faces a different threat of extinction from poaching to diseases (check our website to learn hehe). She also collaborated with youth organizations to spread our efforts and educate students worldwide.
Will coded the virtual museum with the help of google and simplified hacks mentors. (Thank you for your hard work) in java. While Alicia coded the website in HTML before switching to Wix. During her breaks, she searched for possible sponsor software to benefit the code.
Eileen explored the media and drew her graphics to suit our audience: the youth.
Challenges we ran into
Making a virtual museum was extremely brain-racking as most of us were beginners and worked with new languages. We tried to overcome it by exploring the code and planning before starting to code The most notable was the bug in the virtual museum that kept Will all night. After asking for numerous help from the mentors and friends, it wasn’t till an hour before the submission time to debug. Overall, We were extremely passionate and ambitious, we even tried to use AI to process the application.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are most proud of our efforts and chemistry we build during the few hours together.
What we learned
Apart from new coding languages and exposing yourself to new codes, we have learn a few important life tips for hackathons. Set realistic ambitions - Even though we have a lot of great ideas, we need to ground ourself and understand if we can achieve the goal and how long we would take. Not to stay awake and use caffeine - A few of us stayed up all night due to time difference and uncompleted work, which resulted in slower work progress and stomach aches. To have fun - It’s great that we want to win in Hackathons but we need to know that A lot of endangered animals - we hope to be able to share more of this to our friends and family.
What's next for Discover Beyond
We do hope to reattempt to achieve our goals at our own pace. Alicia hopes to complete coding the website in html and event try out java script by the end of this year. Will wants to join another hackathon right after this. Michelle and Eileen would like to take a long nap before finishing up this project.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.