Positive Casino

Positive Casino is a small site where you will get anti-gambling advice while gambling! This is made with the intent of satisfying the gambling impulses of recovering addicts.

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Inspiration

Hello, I'm Hector. I've always been keen on making a good social impact. Fighting addictions has always felt like a topic that doesn't get as much attention as it should. I felt like any project that addressed this issue would help combat it by bringing more awareness. Furthermore, I've had a long-running interest in building websites that I never got to fully explore. So this project idea felt like the perfect middle ground between the two.

Hi, I'm Khoi. I've long been interested in how people get over their addictions, particularly gambling. One aspect of it I'm focusing on is how they don't always completely stop their harmful comsumption, but sometimes they will have "indulging periods" where they can enjoy those addicting activities under strict observation and control. I wanted to make those time periods more beneficial for the recovering addicts, as well as giving the general public some insight understandings and underlying problems of gambling. What better way is there to do that than create a slots machine and make it give anti-gambling advice instead? Welcome to Positive Casino!

What it does

This website presents you with a button to spin a slots machine. After it's finished, instead of traditional results like "Jackpot!", we print out a random advice among the database, with a small chance to give a specific advice to the results (try to spot them)! Furthermore, we've added a helpline and website for SAMHSA, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, as well as websites we've used for the advice output.

How we built it

After getting the encouragement from the Center of Entrepreneurship, we used ChatGPT to create a rough draft of how an HTML-based game would be like. After that, we used Copilot to add further standard functionalities into the code, and fix mistakes if necessary. Consequently, we reverse engineered the code to see which parts of the original code could be changed to fit our desired outcome. Finally, we added some miscellaneous details, such as the helpline for gambling, and the resources we used to find anti-gambling advice.

Challenges we ran into

Running into this project head-first with zero prior knowledge on both JavaScript and HTML was a daunting task. Combined with the difficulty of getting teammates for the first several hours of the project, we were off late to the project. However, we managed to resolve all of them relatively quickly thanks to our teammate and AI writing the code skeleton and fixing mistakes. The 24-hour time constraint was also a big drawback, as we could not manage to add a lot of details to flesh out the website.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creating an HTML+JavaScript website from scratch emulating a basic slot machine on the website

What we learned

CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.

What's next for Positive Casino

This project is only an impulse idea Khoi had for the RevUC2024 Hackathon an hour into it, so it is unlikely to recieve further updates from him. We do feel like this project could see many, many more improvements, but for now, this is the best we could do. We will possibly add some updates to it, like better layout and decorations, who knows?

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