Inspiration
With the election coming up, we wanted to think of a way to make people, especially people of our age who are just beginning to vote, to become more well versed in politics. However, we need the app to be minimalistic so that users are not overwhelmed with a huge amount of data. In addition, we wanted users to be able to find the legislators who are relevant to their specific area.
What it does
The app starts off with a search engine with two options. The user can either search by politician name, or search for a zip code. If searching for a zip code, then the program will return a list of the legislators who's jurisdiction lies in and around that area. In the case that the user enters a politician's name, the application will direct the user to a new page where information about a specific politician is presented.
How I built it
The app itself, of course, required a combination of html, css, and angular.js on the front end. On the back end, in order to create the server we are using node and express. We used several different APIs to gather basic politician information, statistics about their social media, one youtube video of them, and their top donators. This information was then put into angular using http get requests, and then passed from angular directly into our html so that it will show up as an actual, functional web page. Meanwhile, if the user searched by zip code, a different angular function was called on that would simply display all of the politicians relevant to that zip code.
Challenges we ran into
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We managed to get a tremendous amount of the API functionality done, only two out of the total seven API calls that we were making did not work out well. In addition, getting the routing to work in angular with our functions was a huge accomplishment so that we could call on different pages.
What we learned
As a team we learned a lot about angular together and how to properly use it's routing and http functionalities.
What's next for Elect 101
There are many features that we want to add to Elect 101. For one, we had the idea to add a feature where, after already having found statistics for one politician, you can add another politician to the page to compare them side by side.
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