Inspiration
The idea for Newsbet came from wanting to help people to think critically when analyzing articles. The purpose was not to sway anyone's opinion, but to force them to read the article without knowing the title or source, and so judge the article on content alone.
What it does
Newsbet works by first asking the user to either login, or sign up. It then takes the user to the article, where the user reads the full article, decides what sort of bias was written in to the article, and finally place a bet on their confidence level. The title of the article will then be displayed along with the bias based on the rating from AllSides.com. The user can also view their profile, which includes their balance and correct/incorrect guesses.
How we built it
Newsbet was built using an API obtained from DiffBot, which provides the titles, contents, urls, and many other useful information about the articles. The full app was created using JavaScript, CSS, and HTML.
Challenges we ran into
We first tried to use Django, but we couldn't get that to work with Mongo DB. So we switched to using Node.
What we learned
We learned a lot about how to create web apps, and how to use Mongo DB.
What's next for Newsbet
We would like to be able to search for articles by keyword or topic.
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