ECOjourney

Inspiration

The inspiration from this project came from our own personal experiences and connections. Some of our group is part of Society of Women Engineers (SWE)'s sustainability chapter and we were having a conversation about traveling. How do we make traveling more sustainable? What are ways to stay aware & accountable of our carbon footprint? How do we emphasize user experience but also put the environment #1 ?

What it does

Our hack was a cacophony of ideas that came together harmoniously. Starting off with a carbon footprint calculator, we tirelessly spent until 2:30 am at Rice coding an interactive way to measure your footprint while traveling. Next, the tab has a travel quiz on underrated (and common) areas to travel. Lastly, the sustainability tab contains blog articles about ways to be sustainable as well as platform to communicate with other fellow travelers. This allows users to input their own experiences traveling and niche advice on local spots.

How we built it

Powered by insomnia cookies and chick-fil-a, we first made an outline for the ideas we wanted to see in our website. We added, subtracted, and even multiplied ideas until we were satisfied with the ideas we generated. After this pleasant planning phase came the nitty gritty creation. There were a lot of roadblocks and many bugs while creating! So, so much code not working the way we wanted to-- seemingly acting on its own mind. Yet, we persisted. After hours of coding, debugging, and coding again we finally birthed our labor of love.

Challenges we ran into

Time management was definitely a concern! This hackathon took place on the same day as the UVA vs UNC game (turns out we're more of a women's swim & dive school anyway) but also the fact as newbies in coding we lacked a lot of knowledge on what we're doing. We found out about the steep learning curve in a hard way-- lots of Youtube tutorials and frantic googling later we felt confident in our abilities to create. This left not a lot of time for the actual creation part.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are so, so, proud of our final product but moreso our team work! Our collaboration was harmonious, while our group didn't know each other before the competition we communicated clearly and were able to transform the idea we had into our minds into an actual creation.

What we learned

Rice Hall has a tunnel into Olsson! REplit's interface is not the most userfriendly! HTML! CSS! Javascript and taking in user input!!! How to Debug!

What's next for ECOjourney

With the right resources we definitely believe that ECOjourney has great potential. So many people are becoming more mindful for the planet and by having the knowledge & resources to utilize it, we can be on the way to a greener earth.