STEMininity

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  Twitter Banner

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  Example of Twitter Thread (Birthday altered for demonstration purposes)

Inspiration

With the theme of the hackathon in mind, we were aiming to somehow dedicate our project to Women's History Month and the women who paved the road to STEM fields today and unfortunately, are still overlooked in comparison to their male counterparts. After many ideas, we found ourselves excited to make a bot of some sort -- which we ultimately decided on to raise awareness of these powerful women.

Our Twitter bot empower today's’ woman by celebrating women who have made a contribution in STEM on their birthday.

What it does

@STEMininityBot is a Twitter bot that highlights the pioneering achievements of women, who often receive little to no recognition, through tweet threads automatically posted on their birthdays.

How we built it

We mainly built it using python and the python library Tweepy. Using Twitter API, we were able to program the bot so that it would post when we wanted, whether it was a time interval or on a certain day. We were able to use Tweepy documentation to program a bot that would be able to post fun facts about significant women of the day on their birthdays and during the month of Women's History Month. Since we were unable to find public files online to interpret for our program we decided that we'd write our own file so that our program can read it.

Challenges we ran into

None of our teammates has had experience with using any API, finding files to read and interpret, two teammates had to relearn Python under the time constraint, as well as finding sources to help the goal of replying to statuses, rather than simply tweeting each separately.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was the first hackathon for 2/3 teammates, and the first bot any of us have created. In addition, this is the first completed project each of us has contributed to, especially in such a limited time frame. Two of the teammates had either zero or minimal experience with Python, leading us to (re)learn the language within the 24 hours.

What we learned

We learned to cooperate with one another, despite each specializing in different languages (Python, Java, C++), as well as adapting to a different language. We figured out how to utilize API in our project and public libraries available to us to program the bot.

What's next for STEMininity

STEMininity serves as a motivational tweet that will celebrate, empower, and support women who are pursuing STEM. In the future, we hope to tweet a woman every day in the year.

Built With

• python
• tweepy
• twitter-ads-api