Inspiration
Growing up in Asia, some of our parents did not have easy access to medical care. Therefore, they used traditional remedies that have been passed down through generations to help relieve their illnesses. Inspired by this, we had the idea to take everything a step further by introducing these remedies to a new generation: the internet. We hoped to preserve these ancient medicines because they have been a part of not just ours, but billions of other lives.
What it does
Rooted Remedies is an interactive web application that allows a user to find quick and easy remedies for common illnesses. The basic function of the application is to take the user’s input and sort through a database to find the best possible remedies for their symptoms. The top three remedies will be presented based on the provided symptom and user ratings. Finally, the user can try a matching remedy and give feedback on how well it worked..
How we built it
To build this website, we first assigned each of our team members a role to fulfill throughout the course of the process. Two group members worked on the front end and back end of the website using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Python. Another member researched the recipes and descriptions for the remedies Finally, the last member provided extra assistance where it was needed, whether it be by debugging code or typing up remedies. Once we did this, we were able to complete the back end code, which helped the front-end developer complete their job. Finally, we transferred the information from the remedies information to an HTML workspace, allowing us to link the database with the user’s input. Finally, we touched up on the aesthetics of the website.
Challenges we ran into
Some of the challenges that we ran into included some of the code not working due to errors in the functionality. Specifically, when coding the back end development for this project, we realized that our code for the Python was not working the way we wanted it to. It returned the top three values and recipes for each symptom, but it also returned everything else in the table, including the rating and index values, instead of just the recipes that were rated top three. We had to restructure some code to fix this. Also, we ran into a couple of issues with the design of our UI, as we had to come up with a solution in order to combine the Python and the HTML code as opposed to the usual JavaScript and HTML. To work around this, we derived all our data from our Python functions and then hard coded those functions into JavaScript.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were very proud that we were able to learn more about website development with only a little coding background in Python between us. We learned how challenging it can be to design a website, especially a good looking one. We were also very proud of the fact that we were able to actually build the whole website within 36 hours from scratch. Most importantly, we were proud of how much work we put into this project and the fact that we found a cause we supported and felt passionate about - highlighting and preserving traditional homemade remedies for common illnesses.
What we learned
Throughout this process, we learned a tremendous amount from the debugging and development of the website. Firstly, we learned a valuable lesson to not use Python during frontend web development and to try to incorporate more JavaScript in order to significantly streamline the process. Also, we learned a tremendous amount about the Panda library for python, though in the end we replaced its functionality with JavaScript.
What's next for Rooted Remedies
Due to limitations in time and our knowledge, we weren’t able to incorporate all the ideas we had for the website. The biggest idea we would like to implement is to allow users to submit their own remedies to be rated and ranked. This will allow us to feature a far more diverse range of traditional remedies. Something else we’d like to improve is how the user can only select one symptom to search up remedies for. We plan on letting the user be able to select multiple symptoms at a time and be provided with the best remedies that work against all of the symptoms. Additionally, we currently have a page that shows all of the remedies, and we want users to be able to filter and search through that database.
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