Innovo

Once we made the decision to attend HackRice X, we wanted to make a project that was relevant to the three of us. Being all STEM majors, we wanted to do something related to science and, as this was our first hackathon, wanted to create a website for the First Time Track. From this, we came up with the idea of a web application that crowdsources healthcare, which later turned out to be a unifying solution to what is usually a divisive problem: the inequity of access to healthcare. We also thought this would be an interesting take on the idea of supporting social justice, as this issue takes a backseat to the protests in the United States this past summer.

What we immediately learned were some languages that could be used for our task. We settled on Flask, then subsequently HTML, CSS, and Bootstrap. We then set out to make this site functional: for us, that meant creating a login page, a forum for the crowdsourcing aspect of our project, and making our site dynamic. The first task turned out to be much more of a challenge than we thought. In the span of a weekend, we had to learn (1) the syntax for rendering the login and registration forms, (2) create a database to store this data, (3) find a way to hash the passwords, and (4) write code using JinJa to error message displays dynamic. All of this, and we still had the main task ahead of us, which was to fulfill our idea of what the project should be like.

Eventually, we were able to complete the login and registration forms, and moreover style them with CSS and Bootstrap to fit the theme of our site. With that we then split into two teams: one worked on the front-end design and the other investigated how to implement features such as forums and chats. Unfortunately, with valuable time taken away from the login/registration phase of the project, we were not able to find time to make them fully functional. We did construct a primitive chat feature which works for communication for one appointment. Scheduling at this point remains a showcase on the personal profile page. However, one notable success was the implementation of a forum into our site, which was the most satisfying as it most strongly satisfied our crowdsourcing idea at the start of this project. With that, we felt like we had achieved an appreciable amount of our vision for this project, and we look forward to continue working on it in the future!