Plan A

Website that caters to women and gender minorities to navigate sexual education in an approachable, inclusive way including resources such as articles, world news, quizzes, books , glossary and chat

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Inspiration

One of the most challenging things growing up as a woman was navigating sex ed as a preteen. During that age, everything seemed very uncertain and it felt very embarrassing to ask for help. This is often the case for many women and other gender minorities who are often significantly underrepresented in the sex ed lessons given at school. This is often due to the stigma that society upholds, especially around sexual health and puberty. Many individuals lack the proper sexual education needed to lead a healthy life. Sexual health is a necessary component of living a healthy life. Hence, we created a website that caters to women and gender minorities to navigate sexual education in an approachable, inclusive way where they can learn from a variety of resources.

What it does

Plan A is created to educate users about sexual education, with resources on a variety of underserved topics, such as consent, real-world issues involving sex ed and media sources with inclusive representation. We believe that a topic cannot be taught in only one way and that people should have access to inclusive education. Plan A has various features ranging from quizzes, a glossary, news articles, books and even a chat feature that recommends health professionals based on what the user requires guidance on.

How I built it

We built this website almost entirely from scratch using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. We connected the page buttons designed predominantly using CSS leads to the resources users are looking for when they are browsing our main pages in the nav bar.

Challenges I ran into

One challenge we ran into was the quiz feature. We wanted users to be able to review what questions they got incorrect from the quiz so we wanted to make sure that the quiz also provides feedback. This led to us creating a marking system that also provided the correct answers for any the user got wrong after they finish the quiz. Another challenge would be with the search bar. To make it functional, we utilized sorting and binary searching instead of linear searching to showcase our abilities. This was however quite time-consuming with multiple rooms for error. The search bar included a function to scroll down toward the inputted word which was also quite difficult to figure out however we were able to implement it.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

As minorities, these topics were rarely discussed throughout our lives due to the stigma surrounding it in our culture so as preteens, we were stuck learning it all through the internet and we know how difficult it is to look through a variety of websites for information on our own bodies. This website is definitely something we are proud of because it tackles an issue we both personally struggled with throughout our childhood and we hope that it helps other struggling teenagers to confidently navigate their sexual health.

What I learned

Throughout this experience, we were able to further strengthen our web dev skills as there were multiple occasions where we had to refresh some of our skills as well as learn something entirely new (e.g. adding in graphs and charts). A lot of our objective throughout this project was related to making a website that would be engaging to a user. This experience allowed us to experiment and take into greater account the appearance of the user interface and how that influences the success of a website.

What's next for Plan A

As the next steps, we’d like to implement an actual AI feature which would replace the current connections tab we have on the website to allow for more of a versatile experience. It would allow for more insightful inquiry and cater to the user's needs to a greater extent by updating professional suggestions and resources with more accuracy.

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