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Inspiration
I am interested in social inequality and how we can motivate the greater public to think critically about the education system and what needs to change about it. When I saw that there was an education track, I decided that I wanted to make a website that users (primarily children but also anyone of any age) could use. My hope is that once this product is finished, it can become a resource for teachers to show students or for anyone who wants to learn more about the global and American education system and how it is related to inequality and the greater society's well-being.
What it does
The website aims to accomplish two things: 1) show visualizations of education data, 2) ask questions that prompt users to think about the education system, and 3) predict future inequality in education. The first set of visualizations I wanted to show was global data. I wanted to show how every country has inequality in their education, and how this may relate to their quality of life (represented by HDI). This is the map and scatterplot visualization. This section will prompt users to consider how inequality in education can change an entire society's quality of life. I did not have time to start the second part, but I also want to create another set of visualizations that are specific to the US in the future. These will show how the US education system does have inequality (fundings for districts, gender inequality in education, etc.). I plan to make another map of the US and also a graph that compares annual income for college graduates vs. non-college graduates. I also added some questions about education and inequality, but I will be thinking more about this and adding deeper questions that are more directly related to the data in the future.
How we built it
First, I designed the website in Figma. I wanted it to be pretty simplistic and straightforward so that even children could understand intuitively. I designed the UI and style in this stage. I also decided what kinds of information I wanted and how to organize this. Next, I built this website using React (build the framework), HTML/CSS (create and style elements), Bootstrap (for organization), d3 and javascript (to create the visualizations). I also used R to plot some data, although it didn't make it into the end result. Finally, I deployed the app on github!
Challenges we ran into
While I have experience in all the languages, I am not too advanced with d3 or javascript. It had also been a year or two since I last touched React, so building the website was a lot more challenging than I expected. I ran into a lot of debugging errors!
Accomplishments that we're proud of
I'm really proud of how the map visualization turned out. It was really annoying to debug because it wouldn't show up, and I even considered scrapping it at one point because I didn't know if I could get it.
What we learned
A lot! I did not originally intend to participate in the hackathon individually, but it ended up motivating me to push myself to build hands-on for every step of the process—from ideation to design to the coding. Ultimately, it was a great way for me to finally gain the motivation to build this project that I had been thinking of since before the hackathon.
What's next for Education & Inequality
I mentioned that I will create another set of visualizations that are specific to the US. I will also add more questions. Beyond that, I am also ideating on creating an AI model as well. It will be interesting if I can build a model to predict how educational inequality will change in the next several years depending on various factors (inflation, income changes, unemployment rates, etc.).
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