Inspiration
We identified a pressing issue among youths today - their disinterest in current affairs due to a perceived lack of excitement and difficulty associated with reading the news. Reading the news can have a positive impact on education because keeping up current affairs can promote creativity, productivity, and effectiveness when it comes to making better/informed decisions, inspiring new perspectives, brainstorming new ideas, and understanding the current events and trends in the world around them. This disinterest in current affairs has resulted in a knowledge gap, leaving them ill-equipped to write about modern-day societal issues for school assignments and reduced digital literacy. To improve quality and effectiveness of education, and combat the spread of misinformation, we came up with Newsquest. We have developed an innovative website/app that gamifies news reading to make it more interactive and engaging for young people. Our goal is to encourage more youths to develop an interest in current affairs by making the process more fun and accessible.
What it does
Newsquest is a progressive web app that allows users the option to read condensed/summarized news articles and implements a points-based reward system to encourage user retention. When the user opens the app, they are asked to log in. Then, in the homepage, they can search through their preferred categories or look up keywords to find articles they are interested in. Clicking on the article allows them to view the article in full. After they finish reading an article, points will be awarded to them which will be used in a leader board ranking among other users, challenging them to read more and rank higher. There is also a profile page, that allows user to edit their name, interests, and other information.
How we built it
First we prototyped a wireframe on Canva. Then we used React, MySQL, News API, Supabase, and Tailwind CSS to code the progressive app.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into challenges when it came to deployment because the NewsAPI (free tier) has a CORS policy which only allows "localhost" as the origin. If we were to deploy it on a domain such as newsquest.vercel.app, CORS would deny requests from that origin.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We used React to create a log in page using user authentication. We used a News API to create a news page that allow users to search for keywords. We also created a leaderboard page for the points system. Lastly, we created a profile page that updates information throughout the whole app (such as name).
What's next for Newsquest
As for our next steps, we want to implement a News Summary function, that provides an easy-to-digest summary of the top 10 headlines in the area of the user's interests. We also want to implement a feature that allows users to add friends and customize their profile and feed to their liking.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.