Inspiration

All children deserve to be a part of and to thrive in society. Today, over 800 thousand Canadian children are identified with having a disability that impacts their daily life, which disproportionately impacts education and social inclusion; and we have to try to provide those children with that chance in a systemically inaccessible world. By ensuring that all kids are given a fair opportunity to succeed, we provide children with a fair chance to exist and flourish.

What it does

ConnectAbility is a website that will collaborate with Alberta Health Services to connect disabled children or children undergoing rehabilitation with adult volunteers who have the same disabilities and experiences, aiming to help these children gain important life skills that their disability may have made difficult to acquire, as well as emotional support and a community. ConnectAbility is a child-centred experience, matching them with an experienced volunteer based on their disability, personality, and hobbies. The child is able to gain practical life skills and personalized advice from someone who can relate to what they are going through, an experience many rehabilitating people are not offered. ConnectAbility promotes firsthand learning of how children can thrive with their disability.

1. Volunteer

   • The volunteer is pre-screened and verified by the Alberta Children's Hospital, and they're able to create a volunteer profile for themselves.
   • They enter their email, name, and some information about their hobbies and interests.

2. Parents

   • Parents are able to search through a database of volunteers based on the disability their child has, and contact volunteers through email.

Functions

1. Daily Logs

   • Allow parents to track what their child learned every day.

2. Skill Tracking

   • Track the new skills their child acquires and their progress over time.

With ConnectAbility, every child has the chance to learn the skills they want and integrate seamlessly into society when their rehab is over.

How we built it

We used Figma to sketch our design and flow of the website. According to those designs, we have developed our frontend useng HTML, CSS and JavaScript. In addition, for managing and securely storing database, we integrated backend system.

Challenges we ran into

Designing a website with app functions while establishing engaging and kid-friendly user interface; storing data with security; search functions using keywords. We also found it hard to integrate a backend and we learned some new things along the way.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Implimented features to cover wide range of challenges might be faced, including how parents are going to contact volunteers, how to ensure volunteers arent reaching out to children themselves, and finding a way for children to track their progress. We're also proud of the fact that we built an almost fully functional website in less than 24 hours, and we learned new things along the way.

What we learned

We learned that building any kind of project, especially something related to healthcare, comes with a variety of challenges. We learned how to integrate JavaScript into our website and a bit about the backend.

What's next for ConnectAbility

• Continue to work on the daily log system.
• Adding a feature that allows parents to view recordings of the volunteer at home, and upload them onto the website to reference later.

Built With

• css
• html
• javascript
• python