Open Arms Initiative

Inspiration

The inspiration for this project was mostly from Youtube videos that dads created to teach skills that they would teach their children. These are mainly directed towards people who grew up without a paternal figure, and we wanted to create a similar resource for people who grew up without maternal figures, specifically young women who may have questions about many topics only moms tend to know. This helps to empower women and allows them to continue learning regardless of the familial resources they have.

What it does

Our project is a website, named Open Arms, which collects and organizes videos, articles, and answers to common questions and topics that young women without maternal figures may not know. On the website users can send questions to the team at Open Arms, and there are links to a forum that has posts and comments about 8 different topics, and to a reddit thread that allows interactions with moms around the world. Users can choose which topic they would like to view on the forum page, and within each topic are posts with different videos or articles.

How we built it

The Open Arms website is based on a template we used from w3schools, with many edits and creative touches to make it our own. It uses HTML and CSS, and we created a live forum from watching tutorials that allows for users to post questions and answers.

Challenges we ran into

While completing the project, some challenges we ran into revolved around navigating the coding languages HTML, CSS, and Javascript. As this was our first time as a group developing a project with these languages, there were times when we did not know how to execute a feature. Another obstacle was with linking another page so our website. We wanted there to be a way for someone to click a button and be linked to another page within the site.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This hackathon is a first for all members of our team, and we are proud of what we have done in the time we've had. We all learned how to code in HTML over the weekend, and through watching tutorials and reading as much as we could on it, we were able to create a website that we are proud of, with multiple different features. We are particularly proud of the forum linked to our page, which took many hours of tutorials and hard work.

What we learned

From previously not knowing any front-end languages, we had to learn the basics of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We did this by reading through the reference sheet and watching Youtube videos.

What's next for Open Arms Initiative

The goal for Open Arms Initiative is to improve the website and forum, to allow for more users and to register moms who are willing to provide advice. We were unable to complete all of the topics in the forum, and the next step is to use what we were able to complete in the "Fashion" category into all the others. We plan to accumulate as many videos, articles and answers as possible to best service all users who come to the site looking for advice, and the continued improvement of the forum will allow users to find topics more easily and to organize topics neatly.