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c.o.d.e our inspiration
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Inspiration
Our project, Down the Rabbit Hole, seeks to take advantage of the addictiveness of scrolling on the internet to encourage youth to learn more. Down the Rabbit Hole addresses a more recent real-world issue: Internet Addiction. Internet Addiction affects users worldwide and can become problematic. For example, with the ease of access to information, one may be at risk of finding and circulating biased information. Similarly, youth are often at risk of interacting with non-educational, hyper-stimulating content for long periods. As an all-women coding team, we chose to reevaluate what it means to code. One may assume coding involves long, tedious and challenging tasks, however, our team demonstrates that coding may be creative, original, dynamic and exciting (C.O.D.E).
What it does
With Down the Rabbit Hole, users may become informed about general topics like History, Literature, Technology and more through web scraping. Our project scrapes the web for articles and web pages related to subtopics of these general topics. A segment of the article, which may have an interesting fact or background information about the subtopic, is displayed for the user. A highlighted word or phrase in this segment will link to a separate article. The user may continue ‘down the rabbit hole’ of information and proceed to the article or end the rabbit hole. Providing the user with this choice allows them to be mindful of the time spent in this rabbit hole and ensures that they may access only content which may interest them.
How we built it
We used graphic images and animations for the design, each created on procreate. We used a combination of Python, HTML and CSS for the website's design. Tools like flask, selenium and good soup were used for web scraping. Python was also used for the website's back-end database. We researched using w3schools.com and youtube.
Challenges we ran into
In deciding to use background images instead of formatting them using HTML and CSS we ran into many difficulties with the image dimensions. We realized that two days isn't nearly as much time as we thought. We were worried about our project meeting the judges' criteria. Our typical thoughts of "real-world issues" ranged from solving world hunger and ending poverty, and we chose an untraditional route. However, our purpose is personal to each of us.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
From the beginning, we were all extremely excited to participate in this hackathon. The possibilities, brewed by iced coffee and late-night video calls, were endless. Down the Rabbit hole was born on the first day, and we instantly began working on it. Our purpose is personal to each of us. We all have experienced the addictiveness of the internet and see how it can affect our peers, family and friends. Thus we classify it as a more modern real-world issue, as we see its effects all around us.
What we learned
We learned about the power of frameworks like Flask and other tools which help us use HTML data in python. We also learned about the importance of creative freedom in code, as we used our artistic skills to help us create a website design which fitted the aesthetic we had in mind (Alice in Wonderland).
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