NaturalizeMe!

One page of the citizenship eligibility calculator
"Resources" page
Logo

Inspiration

All of us recall the stories of our parents' immigrations and how difficult they found it; navigating the endless forms and technicalities of the United States government can be very intimidating, especially for people who are technologically illiterate or know English as a second language. These stresses along with the pain of COVID motivated us to attempt to alleviate the pressure, even if only a little.

What it does

Naturalize Me provides the necessary information to becoming a U. S. citizen through naturalization in a concise and simple way.

How we built it

We used Flask/Python as a framework for developing an HTML5/CSS website.

Challenges we ran into

Our team was relatively inexperienced with web development in Flask, CSS, and HTML5 - getting our site to properly mesh with the navbar and in-site navigation posed quite the challenge, especially during final integration. The primary difficulty we faced was that of attempting to merge code from the different developers; we foolishly thought it would be best if each developer worked on a specific section of the site and that we could merge them at the end. We failed to predict that this would cause more problems than necessary with styling and UI consistency.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have a functioning site that accomplishes our mission statement by creating a functioning website with some fairly complex code behind it (especially in the calculator). We are especially proud of the framework that we built, which will allow us to easily expand the existing product in the future either to make the citizenship through naturalization more robust or to expand in to other fields.

What we learned

We learned a great deal about front end and web development, as well as a great deal about managing and organizing a software engineering team.

What's next for NaturalizeMe!

Translation into multiple languages, something we were unable to complete within the timeframe of our project development, would be a priority. We also hope to launch the website on a public URL for anyone to use, as well as expand the current framework to more fields in need, both in and out of immigration.