Resources for Minorities

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Inspiration

All of us are women of colour, meaning we have experienced many of the stereotypical barriers other minorities face. One of the problems that shone through was the lack of opportunities and resources that were easily accessible for beginners and minorities, specifically. It’s difficult to pick up coding when the competition is already so advanced, and you aren’t sure where to even begin. Some of our inspiration stems from this event itself, providing women and other minorities with the opportunity to participate in a hackathon. We want to give a similar opportunity for beginners to be able to access coding events that cater to them without the struggle and extra effort.

What it does

Finding coding resources is easy, as coding has become far more accessible in recent years. However, often this information is out of order, confusing, overcomplicated, and discouraging for beginners. From personal experience, even beginner friendly languages like html and css were difficult to pick up because of how discouraging it was to just find the very basics. We wanted to create a website which helps provide useful coding information for women and other minorities that are just starting with helpful explanations and reasons why we would recommend those websites, as beginners ourselves. Keeping track of all the coding resources you may need can also be tiresome, which is why our website provides an organised and effortless view of everything so that whoever is using it has all of the information in one space. Only having to bookmark one website instead of sorting through five tabs every time you want to learn how to program something is easier on your mind and your computer.

How we built it

We first started with a basic outline of what we wanted our website to look like. From there it was mostly experimenting and inspecting other peoples code to help develop our first prototype. It was a slow but worthwhile process that allowed us to get a simple outline of our website. After we were happy with the html code, we began using the style tag to start formatting. Using the style tag was full of experimenting and trial and error. After we were happy with the website and how it looked, we began using more advanced code. Such as the drop down menu option for the navigation bar sections.

Challenges we ran into

There are many issues that women and minorities face in the world today. It was difficult to choose just one, as we wanted to target many. It was also hard to brainstorm a problem that we could solve with a solution presented in a website format. Another issue was that since we were all beginners, and had no prior coding experience, it was difficult to find a problem that was solvable within our boundaries in such a limited time period. There were features we wished we could add but are not within our current abilities like: being able to make a personalised account so that the user could bookmark any resources or events, being sent email notifications about new events that pertain to their identity, or receiving emails about changes or reminders for events they selected. All of those features would streamline the website’s user experience further, which is ultimately our biggest priority.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re all proud of ourselves for learning how to code, even if it is only the basics. Previously, the concept of coding was extremely foreign and intimidating, and not something any of us really thought we would fully understand. However, since attending the workshops and learning a little bit about html and css on our own, we have realised how easily applicable this concept is in our everyday lives. Coding has been something we have all wanted to learn, but have put off because of how complicated it seems in the media, and we’re proud of finally being able to claim that we’re able to code.

What we learned

We learned that coding is not as tough as we thought it would have been, and that with the right resources, learning the foundations of html and css can be quite easy. Of course, our knowledge right now is still only the baseline, because there’s an entire world of css that we don’t know about, but that just means that we can continue learning further. The most important aspect is that we have learned how to apply coding into our life. Whether it is building websites or making games, we have the ability to create it.

What's next for Resources for Minorities

We plan on participating in a wide variety of coding activities which help solve issues for minorities. Simple actions, such as creating a website, can bring vast amounts of knowledge for those who are looking for it. We plan on updating this website continuously and sharing it with other people. Moreover, we have gained valuable insight on the situation of women in the STEM field and wish to provide an effort to increase the ratio of women and men in this workforce. By participating in events and joining organizations, we are able to increase the resources for minorities by spreading the knowledge to other people.

Built With

• css
• google
• html
• imovie
• slides