Nova | Devpost

Inspiration

80% of British adults said it is important "to be alive to issues of race and social justice" thus showing high support to raising awareness to social justice. However, in the current climate social justice is often put on the backburner due to more pressing concerns such as crime and immigration. Whilst these are very popular public concerns they have also be raised and gaining further momentum since 2022, hence social justice has been in the corner for 3 years. How much longer can social justice be ignored? As a result, we aim to design an app that can raise awareness and educate others further about social justice.

Furthermore, if social justice were to continue to decline in the UK it has knock-on effects on social, political, economic and personal levels. Some examples of its spiralling effects include: widening inequalities due to less public focus leading towards deepening the disadvantages for already marginalised groups, negative impacts on mental health due to discrimination and the weakening of safeguards due to less awareness which may lead to lower productivity, which also provides an economic cost due to higher welfare costs, slower economic growth and potentially missed opportunities in talent caused by reduced workforce participation from groups with increasing barriers to entry. Prejudice towards marginalised groups can also continue to affect the political climate of the world through growing conflicts which further reinstates the importance of the awareness social justice on all levels.

What it does

To address social justice we decided to create a quiz-style app to gamify the learning process and awareness. As a result this will encourage active engagement whilst addressing key definitions in relation to social justice as well as potentially key topics. By deepening young adults understanding of specific terminology within social justice it can start the ball rolling for talks and debates across generations thus potentially leading to a raise in widespread awareness.

How we built it

The interface was built using Figma allowing us to develop an interactive user interface prototype demonstrating the possibilities of what the app would look like and how it would flow for users. In addition, the algorithms for the gaming and quiz logic was built within python using multiple subroutines which would be called upon within a main while loop. This allowed for users to be able to play the games multiple times while having a randomised set of questions each game.

Challenges we ran into

Having the interface run smoothly and debugging the code proved to be quite challenging. To overcome this we further deepened our previous experience with these languages and platforms through various tutorials to try and apply fixes towards our problems. We also simplified the logic within the code by removing some previously nested loops allowing us to remove a layer of complexity and find the specific error to debug.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Due to mainly looking at low code hackathons, we are very proud of the code we have produced as well as how functional it is.

What we learned

New techniques and new in-built modules making our programming more efficient and improving our problem solving methods in how we handle languages.

What's next for Nova

Making a more in depth interface, thus being able to handle more quizzes and flashcards would improve the prototype and better convey the potential of this app.