Inspiration
We wanted to create something that educates about accessibility, in this case the accessibility of food. Michael, one of our team members, likes to volunteer at local food pantries, and he suggested we create something to help spread awareness of the issue of food insecurity.
What it does
The website contains several interactive elements, including an interactive map of food insecurity in Texas and a quiz about various hunger-related statistics, in addition to descriptions of the issue as well as links to places to get involved in the local area.
How we built it
The website was written using HTML and CSS, beginning with a Boostrap template. The interactive map was made using Tableau, and the quiz backend was handwritten in Javascript. We launched the site on a server hosted using Oracle Cloud with an extra domain one of the team members owned.
Challenges we ran into
Tableau proved rather troublesome to work with as it didn't want to embed with proper scaling. Setting up a self-signed SSL certificate for the website was also quite an ordeal. In addition, only one of our team members had any sort of formal web design experience (though a second member had dabbled in it a little bit).
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The project was well-suited to a "divide and conquer" approach, with each team member responsible for a portion of the project. Everyone worked hard, learned many new things, and carried their weight on the team, resulting in an end result we can be proud of. We were also able to use git effectively to collaborate, which was new to several of us.
What we learned
We all learned quite a bit about web design and collaboration skills. In addition, we learned quite a bit about food insecurity in our research on the topic.
What's next for Stop Local Hunger
To continue the project, we could expand the information on the website to include automatically updated statistics for every county in the US. We also considered adding more interactive experiences or games to the site, but didn't have time during the hackathon to do so. With the expansion of the website, we could allow users to select their community in order to see their local resources to get involved in, rather than just listing Waco's.
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