Inspiration
Footprint Formula was inspired by early carbon emission calculator websites our group members would use in elementary school. These calculators only accounted for transportation emissions and we thought we could make a calculator that accounts for a wider variety of factors that impact carbon emissions and present them in a meaningful manner to give an impactful, detailed representation of how much you really make an impact on nature.
What it does
Footprint Formula is a website that calculates one's carbon footprint based on several factors over various aspects of an individual's lifestyle.
How we built it
Footprint Formula is built using HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
Challenges we ran into
The first and most daunting challenge is that NONE of our groupmates have made a website nor touched HTML, CSS, or Javascript. However, learning these languages was something all of us really wanted to do. We bit the bullet and through tutorial after tutorial, StackOverflow searches, we were able to make our first functional website.
There were also the occasional bugs that happened here and there whether that be misaligned text, a misfunctioning button, or giant foot png stamped across our page. These bugs were even harder to fix due to our lack of experience with these new languages.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Our group mates didn't get to fully realize the vision we had in mind, however it was a MAJOR accomplishment to even make a website in the first place considering none of us had ever seen a single line of HTML code in our lives. To have a functional website (with animated buttons :) ) and being able to add UI design/ learning more front-end capabilities was a huge accomplishment that we all can proudly say we've achieved.
What we learned
Every groupmate learned how to use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It was a truly amazing experience to delve into the front end for the first time in our lives. We went crazy over the simplest things that any experienced programmer might find trivial. From learning how to animate using keyframes, to creating our first headers and divs, it was truly an entertaining experience to watch everything come together.
The best feeling was finally being able to program those buttons to calculate a number and display it onto a header. While again, this is something that seems so trivial, it felt like a monumental achievement for each of us novice front-end developers to see the number go from 0 to the number we calculated in our functions.
What's next for FootprintFormula
Now that we've all had our first experience in front-end developing through FootprintForumla, each of our group members is eager to further develop the website by adding more detailed calculations for your carbon footprint. This includes making more detailed car emission calculations by selecting specific car models and getting their specific fuel economy values rather than just an average car value. We also hope to update the way the information is presented to the viewer. We want to be able to compare your individual carbon footprint with the world, and give graphical representations as to how big your footprint would be (i.e how many arenas could your carbon footprint fill up over 1 or 2 or even 10 years from now.). This is so the viewer can truly understand how their habits in their daily lives make an impact on an environment and how to can change it for the better.
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