Promptly

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  Promptly

Inspiration

As a team, we have seen the firsthand impacts of isolation from social media. From friends stuck on their phones during lunch to the constant itch to check a notification, social media is drawing people away from each other more than bringing us together.

Even worse is the challenge to try and promote good mental health when battling the toxic but addicting environment that social media presents.

Promptly is a small act of rebellion, a small step to a leap of growth. By making learning about other cultures engaging, Promptly combats isolation by replacing it with curiosity. Even better, Promptly makes it easy to hold the commitment to oneself, to spend a small amount of time every day reflecting on oneself and improving their mental health.

What it does

The goal is for the website to have a different question every day, and with it comes the option to anonymously write a response. Once entered, based on the responder's location, a pin will appear on the map, and once clicked on, the response will expand, allowing others to read through it and comment.

How we built it

It mostly only used HTML and CSS to handle the website UI and user experience. Our group had experience in Java and Python, so some of the ways we thought through problems were first created with that knowledge in mind, and then we found ways to make it happen with what we did have.

Challenges we ran into

Initially, we wanted to start with a 3D world map, drawing inspiration from Radio Garden. However, the code and understanding behind that goal were quite complicated and time-consuming, so we chose to scrap that and go for a flat 2D map instead. Also, we thought to have a Gemini API to generate the random questions, but the key came with an age restriction, so we opted to have an array for a pool of questions and solved the problem through that.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It was hard to step up to a weekend-long hackathon where we didn't feel so confident in our coding abilities, especially as minority women in STEM. We are proud that we represented ourselves to the best of our abilities and proved to ourselves too that there isn't a place that we don't belong. As girls, we can innovate, create, and code. Beyond the technical experiences, we'll be taking away confidence.

What we learned

Through our research and previous knowledge of mental health topics and what we chose to interpret the meaning of connection as, we learned more about how we could use that to design and invent ideas that would not only satisfy our own struggles but also propose an additional solution of awareness.

What's next for Promptly

We have a couple of tweaks to the website we hope to accomplish in the future. First, to turn that 2D map into a 3D map, which we personally feel like has a more engaging aspect to Promptly. Next, we want to add zoom-in and zoom-out features, almost so it feels like playing Geoguessr, so that there's a more interactive aspect even though the people are anonymous.

Built With

• css
• html