RECONNECT

Find your place in nature!

Comment

Our Inspiration 🌸

In the past year, the pandemic has made it increasingly difficult to get outside. Even as nature lovers, we have found ourselves watching our vibrant Florida sunsets behind the screens of our hurricane-impact windows, sitting in front of computers that have, in many ways, replaced our entire lives. However, just because our lives came to a sudden halt doesn’t mean that climate change stopped with us––although pollution has somewhat decreased since the beginning of the pandemic, we still have a long way to go to slow the detrimental effects of climate change. Thus, we built RECONNECT as a way to help people like ourselves rebuild their bond with the natural world and develop a deeper appreciation for the earth.

What RECONNECT Does🌱

RECONNECT is a website dedicated to streamlining the process of finding natural parks and volunteering centers. We use a Google Maps API to pinpoint locations of these parks (particularly in South Florida), and also allow organizations who have a membership with us to add their own events. We have a rewards system based on Connection Coins (CC), which also motivates our users to go to events and parks!

How We Built RECONNECT 💻

We used HTML and CSS to create a user-friendly, simplistic, and aesthetically pleasing website for our users. To ensure that our site functions in a reliable way, we used JavaScript to allow our users to interact with the site. We used a Google Maps API to build the map that users can use to easily locate parks in their area.

Challenges We Ran Into ❌

Our biggest challenge was building the feature for organizations to add their events to our map. Fortunately, we were able to create that function, allowing for greater personalization for our users! Another challenge we ran into was making a change on a different tab of the website from a button click on the tab the user was on. For example, when the user signed up for an event on the “Events” tab, we had to update the “Results” tab. Lastly, updating the users balance and keeping track of which cards they built was quite the challenge.

Accomplishments that we're Proud Of 🏆

We are extremely proud of the fact that we were able to improve our site’s level of personalization by allowing users to add their own events to our map. Additionally, it proved difficult to create the user profile detailing the events and Connection Coins (CC) of a user, but we were very proud of the results! Overall, we are quite pleased with the style of the site, especially since we coded it all from a bare HTML file, as the size of the buttons, minimal text, and large pictures make it both pleasant and accessible for all audiences.

What We Learned 📖

This was the first time either of us have worked with an API, so we learned a lot from the experience! We learned how to manipulate the google maps API, including how to add our own markers and customize the styling of the map. In addition, we learned how to implement JavaScript commands into HTML elements, which made events happen all across different tabs of the website. Lastly, we learned how to optimally use a CSS style sheet, as in the previous websites we had designed, all styling was done in-line (yikes!)

What's Next for RECONNECT? 📈

RECONNECT has an extensive future ahead of it, as we plan to implement a database to add natural parks and volunteer centers from all over the country onto our map. We would also like to create a mobile app to help track the smaller lifestyle changes for our users. In addition, we can add more ways to keep the user engaged, such as implementing a way that the user can add their friends on the website, and participate with them in events. Our possibilities are as limitless as the expansive ecosystems we hope to protect!

Share this project:

Updates