Pangea

Immigration is oftentimes a confusing process. Pangea tackles this issue by connecting immigrants to resources that will help them transition into their new lives and give them a sense of community.

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Inspiration

The Immigration Story

While brainstorming a problem to tackle in this challenge, we were intrigued by the lengths that many immigrants are willing to take for a new beginning. We wanted to come up with a way to try and ease this oftentimes difficult, intimidating transition to a new country and culture by creating a platform that would allow immigrants to connect with communities and resources relating to them. Current politics highlight the rising crisis of immigration and the major implications that it could have on current and future generations. An immigrants story does not end after they arrive in the US, their struggle can continue for years after their move. Hopefully, Pangea can bridge the gap between immigrants and their new environment, improving their lives in their new home.

What is It?

There are no borders in Pangea

Pangea provides a user-friendly platform that immigrants can use to locate and connect with cultural resources, communities, and organizations near them. Our website fosters a close connection to cultural centers and allows immigrants to easily find resources near them that can ease their transition into the US. Some of Pangea's major features include an interactive heat map that shows various restaurants, shops, community centers, and resources based on the users' selected features and a plug-in to the telegram social media platform, an app commonly used by many immigrants. This plug-in links directly to a translation bot that allows users to practice their english or perform a quick translation if they need to do so.

How We Built It

Used HTML, Javascript, CSS, PHP, a Google Map API, NLP, and a Telegram plugin

Using HTML and a Google Maps API we created a homepage and a heat map showing resources in the area that may be useful for immigrants. For the plug in, we found a Telegram plugin online that was simple to integrate into our code and create a helpful little translator accessible via a small bubble in the homepage.

We also researched data for a couple of ethnicities and created code that added these data points to the heat map to show densities of what resources are where.

Challenges

As with any project, it was not always smooth sailing. Throughout our time creating this platform, we ran into many problems such as dealing with an unfamiliar language (most of us had not used Javascript before), tackling new programming techniques (such as building a website, creating a heat map, and utilizing API's and plug-ins), and fighting through the growing exhaustion as our lack of sleep caught up to us.

Accomplishments

Our team is extremely proud of what we have accomplished this weekend. As a team composed of freshman and sophomores with little to no experience with hackathons, we were able to produce a working website that incorporates many different features. Despite not having done many of the things we attempted this weekend, we succeeded in using plug-ins, an API, and natural language processing in our prototype. We also worked very well together as a team and formed bonds that will last long after HackMIT ends.

What We Learned

Throughout this experience, we learned many new skills that we will now be able to take with us in our future studies and projects. A few of the things we learned are listed below:

  • How to build a website
  • How to install a plug-in
  • How to integrate API's into our website
  • Natural Language Processing (NLP)
  • How to create a heat map
  • How to code in Javascript

What's Next for Pangea?

Pangea knows no bounds

The applications for this site are near limitless. We hope to see Pangea grow as not only a resource for immigrants, but also a means of connection between them. In the future, we would like to incorporate profiles into our website, even expanding it into an app to create a social network for immigrants to connect with people of similar backgrounds, different cultures, and resources such as translators, lawyers, or social activists. In addition, we would like to add more data to our heat map to expand our reach past the local span of the Boston area. We plan to do this by scraping more data from the internet and including a more diverse scope of cultures in our database. Finally, we hope to further refine the translation bot by adding more language options so that Pangea will expand to even more cultural groups.

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