HealthyPanda

Designed to help teens better understand their mental health and provide an outlet for any emotions they want to let out. Healthy - it's the Panda way.

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Inspiration

We were inspired to make a mental health resource by the introduction of the 911 equivalent for mental health, 988. We decided early on to name our group The Fluffy Pandas. So when we made a test logo on Canva, we made it a panda. Then came the tagline "Healthy - It's the Panda Way". That sort of got shortened to HealthyPanda.

What it does

HealthyPanda provides a safe and secure place for teens (and people of all ages!) to rant and reflect, as well as learn about mental health. Users are encouraged to submit reflections and rants to be eaten by the panda, as a way to “let it out”. There is also a button that directs users to the suicide hotline website.

How we built it

HealthyPanda was built with Flask as its framework, and most of the website that you see is built with HTML and CSS. Some of it is JavaScript.

Challenges we ran into

A big challenge was getting the reflection prompts to be correctly displayed after being implemented with a python dictionary in the back-end. It took a long time, especially since only one of the developers knew how to do this. Another one of our developers (cough Mina cough) had a smaller, silly problem. They thought JavaScript wouldn’t work in Flask. So they made their button using only HTML. This works… except it only allows for one function at a time and the buttons need two. This developer spent multiple hours trying to figure this out before finally giving in and following a Javascript tutorial. It worked from then on with no problems. An even smaller problem was that the placeholder text in the text boxes was finicky. It would only show up after someone has written and erased text. We just got rid of the placeholders altogether for consistency.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As this is our first time participating in a hackathon, we’re very proud of our teamwork and that we were able to put together a polished project! We played to each person’s strengths and helped each other out in our weaknesses.

What we learned

Developer Bhavya - Prior to the hackathon I had a very basic knowledge of Javascript, HTML and CSS. Participating in this hackathon not only expanded my prior knowledge but I learned new skills and languages such as Python by working with my teammates. I realized that coding an entire website in two days is no easy feat, there were many times in the coding process when I ran into a problem and felt like giving up, but after pushing through and overcoming the challenge it motivated me to overcome even bigger challenges. Working on this project also introduced me to many aspects of mental health such as the 4F trauma response types.

Developer Mina - I learned so much! I had done almost no coding before this, so joining a hackathon was a huge leap of faith. I learned how websites as a whole are set up when I watched the rest of the team make the files to get started. Adding the decorative elements was surprisingly easy for me. The functional elements were extremely frustrating at times. I had never done anything other than basic text before, so even a simple button was hard. I was so happy when the random selector I made worked. When Developer Mab first started sorting the prompts to make the information cards, the website looked like it was broken. I was so scared. But Mab finished the code and it turned out amazing. I shocked myself with my persistence and resilience by continuing this project even when I was crying and yelling. I did not once consider giving up even though that used to be my default. I am so proud of myself and I think I’m going to do a lot more code in the future. Seeing my writing go from something I was good at but bored with to being an article on an actual website with a video to advertise it was very motivating. I am excited to write more and get it out to the world. This has been one of my happiest weekends ever despite my many emotional melt-downs. Being able to implement little details that I think are cool was something I’ve never been able to do with my other hobbies. I can now always carry with me stories of behind-the-scenes mishaps, funny solutions, and little easter eggs. This has been the most rewarding source of misery I have ever purposefully subjected myself to.

Developer Litong - This was a great chance for me to learn HTML and CSS! I had some prior experience, but almost forgot it all. If given another chance, I would probably get more involved with the coding. Outside of programming, I also learned about aspects of mental health like the 4F response types.

Developer Mab (Manya) - is not here right now, so Mina is writing her spot instead. I don’t know for sure what Mab learned since I’m not Mab, but she did most of the hardest parts of our code. She spent as long as necessary making the information cards work. It looked like Mab was learning as she went for some parts of the information card system. She probably learned a lot about sorting systems. Mab was great to work with and supportive when I doubted myself.

Mab is back! I had a great time this weekend. I recently started learning about Flask (I watched a couple of YT videos) so it was nice to have a chance to put what I learned into action. I think I understand the structure a lot better, which will help me in the future to make even cooler projects. I also learned how to work with Bootstrap, which, thanks to the great documentation, was much easier to work with than expected. I hadn't worked with JS before this project, so I did learn that. I also learned more about how these different technologies interact with each other. I went to a couple of workshops, like the one with Summer Jiang from Google, and I learned a lot from them. But more than any of that, I learned to work with people in a way that we could use our different strengths to complete a project timely. While joining this hackathon was an impulse decision, I'm glad I did it.

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