Pep Penguin

Pep Penguin is a public penguin-themed website that allows users to interact with each other and schedule winter gatherings. It features a custom map, recent weather reports, and penguin facts.

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Inspiration

Our biggest inspiration came from the friends and family we interviewed when looking for potential problems. Some acquaintances had shown interest in winter activities, such as skiing, snowboarding, and skating, but decided against going because they had no one to share these activities with. Additionally, we noticed many people had problems with having little in-person social interaction as well as not being willing to go outside due to the cold weather. Thus, we decided that we should create a platform that encourages communities to come together through various winter activities.

Our theme for Penguins was simply inspired by our collective interest in the animal since it thrives in winter temperatures. When people think of penguins, they envision a bird that makes the most of the winter season. In this regard, we hope that the penguins can inspire our audience to make the most of their lives, particularly in the winter!

What it does

This website has 4 main features: the forum, the map, the weather, and the penguin facts.

The forum is a way for users and interact with each other. There, they can talk about winter-themed activities, although primarily skiing, snowboarding, and ways to meet up. This section of our website promotes social interaction, which is good for mental health and helps keep the energy of people at home high, or in other words, it puts some pep into their step!

Next, we have the map, which is for users to mark locations that are for skiing and snowboarding. The map also has a rating system, so when a user has gone to a specific place, they can give that place a rating on the map out of 5. The goal of this section is to encourage inexperienced skiers to get out there and meet people. We hope that through the rating system, meeting with others and simply enjoying themselves will be less daunting!

Next, we have the weather. This section shows what the temperatures are for the day, as well as the humidity and wind speeds. Safety is the top priority for many, while comfort is a close second; through this weather section, planning gatherings that have just the right weather conditions is within a click of a button! Again, we hope to encourage those who are inexperienced or who are nervous about trying out snowsports to get out there and do their best!

Lastly, there are the penguin facts. This section is just to give the website some variety, and let people learn more about the nature of the animal. We wanted to use it to promote our theme and make our website more unique. We also hope that it can attract penguin-lovers to our website or create more penguin-lovers in general. Who doesn't love a cute fluffy penguin after all?

How we built it

We built this website using the foundation of the 3 major languages: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We then used many different APIs to give the website its functionality. The main ones were weather.js, leaflet.js, and socket.io. Weather-js was used to create the weather section of our website. Leaflet was used to create the interactive map. Socket was used to create client and server-side parts, used primarily in the forums.

Challenges we ran into

A major challenge was time management. Since it was our first hackathon, we didn't know what we were capable of, so we ended up skimming a lot of the things we were planning on doing since we knew after some time that based on our pace it wouldn't be realistic to try to do everything before the deadline.

Another massive roadblock was trying to host the server publicly; there were not many server-hosting platforms which caused us large amounts of stress. It was very time-consuming to create a forum due to the amount of knowledge necessary to create an interactive client and server. Something else of note, is the website we are using to host our Again, this plays into our first factor.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Some of the accomplishments we're proud of are the forums and the map. We thought it would be a cool way to help navigate through the world and expand on opportunities to go to different places for meeting up. On a technical level, the forums are very impressive, at least to beginners like ourselves.

We are also proud of what we were able to accomplish in the timespan provided. Considering that this was our first hackathon, this is a major success!

What we learned

We learned that a lot of small QOL things in the website can take way more time in the website; the small things tend to take much longer to code than the more major things, such as the layout and the UI of the website.

We also improved many of our pre-existing skills, like project management, time management, programming skills, and creative thinking.

What's next for Pep Penguin

There are many improvement areas for Pep Penguin.

1) We would like to create and implement it as an application. From a practical standpoint, it would be far more useful if Pep Penguin were an application instead of a website. It would provide lots more functionality in terms of transportability, ease of use, etc.

2) Another large improvement area for Pep Penguin is the graphics. In the future, we would like to make the graphics a lot better and make it themed a lot more after penguins.

3) We would like to integrate penguins more deeply into our idea. We want to make the penguins a common point between the two users that will help connect them.

4) We would like to include a news section as it would provide more functionality to our idea. A news app could help users stay safer from viral infections and weather issues.

5) We would like to add privacy, safety, and security protection. If Pep Penguin becomes larger and attracts more and more people, it will be essential to have safety features implemented. We must ensure that users are protected and that our site does not facilitate any dangerous or threatening activity.

6) We would also like to add the ability to edit or delete posts and comments made in the forum.

7) We would also like to increase the scope of the map since we recognize that the scope we created was only for our city. It would be very beneficial if users were able to create popular locations and if we could better integrate gatherings into the website.

In conclusion, Pep Penguin was created through the diligence of many nights. Its goal is to connect people in person, removing the strain on society that COVID-19 had placed oh so long ago. There were many challenges with its implementation, but, we believe that overall, Pep Penguin could be a great tool to connect people and assist them in staying active and making the most of winter!

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