Inspiration
We were inspired by the feeling of validation that you got as a kid when your good work was rewarded by a sticker, hence we decided to create a “grown-up” version of this feeling by incorporating words of encouragement for students and working adults. We choose these individuals as our target audience because we understand the daily pressure of meeting the demands of academic and labor standards. We also decided to add gentle reminders for users to take care of themselves (as we can often be too absorbed in our work to even eat proper meals, exercise and drink water). Overall, we wanted to create a fun way of entertaining our audience.
What it does
Sticking Validation is an extension which as explained earlier gives physical (or digital in this case) validation for a student’s hard work with online school. Whenever a student opens a chrome window and clicks on a new tab, they get words of encouragement accompanied with a cute soothing picture of an animal and a little sticker. They can save the stickers in a sticker box which they can view in the pop-up of the extension!
How we built it
We built this extension with the use of basic HTML, CSS and Javascript. We watched Youtube tutorials to learn how to create a chrome extension.
Challenges we ran into
Learning new technologies is always difficult at first. We ran into some problems working with the localStorage since it is not something that we had worked with before. But with the help of documentation and many hours of research we were able to overcome this challenge to make our extension work as intended. We also had some difficulties with the responsiveness of the website, we weren’t able to format the page the way we wanted it at first but with some studying, we were able to put together something we were proud of.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We haven’t had the chance to work that much with front-end web development so this hackathon really pushed us to learn different technologies. One of our team members does not have much experience with coding so this was a great learning experience for them. We are also proud that we managed to make something from scratch in the short amount of time that we had.
What we learned
We learned many new technologies, mostly the uses of JS and chrome extension tools. None of us had an idea of how Chrome Extensions actually worked despite us using them in our daily lives. We learned a lot about how manifest.json files work as well as how to use the LocalStorage of a browser using Javascript.
What's next for Sticking Validation
As of right now, the pictures and text that we used are stored locally. We would also be interested in making this chrome extension available for everyone by deploying it online, which entails that we would need to use a database of some sort to store all the media needed to load the pages. Moreover, it would be fun if we could make the sticker box more interactive. Since as of right now, it only collects stickers and displays them. We would also be interested in making this chrome extension available for everyone, which entails that we would need to work on many aspects. We also have a very limited number of stickers since they are all hand-drawn, so in the future, we would like to offer a bigger variety of stickers. The pictures of animals used were taken from the internet, in the future of Sticking Validation, all media on the page should be our own to avoid copyright issues.
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