Stop Asian Hate - Map, Survival Game and Action

Map
Crime
Discuss
Event
Game
Donate

Inspiration

Asian Americans have long been targets for different kinds of assaults, and the situation has become even worse since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, hate crimes and discrimination toward Asian people in the U.S. has been discussed for long yet still waits for significant attention and changes. We want to dive deeper into this issue because we are Asian students studying here, also a part of Asian communities here who should speak up and stand united to reveal and fight back racism.

Stop Asian Hate should not be “just another movement” started by a minority group. This is our joint call for the universal safety and equity in the name of the Asian victims in numerous crimes, the muted elderly Asian immigrants, the underrepresented Asian employees, and many other Asian people who have ever felt threatened or depressed under the recent circumstance. We want to simulate the risks and threats in Asian people’s daily life through our game, to draw its reflection of real-world incidents, and to suggest how we could probably make things better. We believe our efforts will bring some insights and influence, and with united efforts across communities we can make a huge difference step by step.

What it does

Map of Incidents

On a map of the United States there are orange marks indicating that incidents of Asian American-targeted hate have occurred at the marked locations. Users can zoom and drag the map to find the locations they care about. When clicking at a mark, the details of the corresponding incident will be shown on the left of the web page.

Currently we only get the data of reported incidents within California. However, we are confident that given appropriate time and support we should be able to gain access to the data of the entire country as well as collect new reports of incidents to update the map.

Discussion Board

We encourage not only Asians but also people of all races to express their opinions and support each other. This gives people a platform to turn for help when feeling unsafe and get involved in collective efforts to make the community a safe and respectful place for every member. We also crave for a publicly accessible forum to let Asian people tell their stories, to encourage those who feel alone to speak, and to bring actionable changes.

Survival Game

At the start of the survival game, the initial life value is 20 and the protagonist has survived 0 day. The aim for the players is to survive as many days as possible.

Each day the player is first asked to decide which action to take in order to increase life. The higher the life value is, the greater the probability of survival will be. Then the player is assigned with a random task to finish on that day (e.g. go to school, buy groceries), and the task comes with a random risk value. If the life value is greater than the risk value, the protagonist survives the day. Otherwise, the game is over and the player will see the number of days the protagonist has survived successfully.

The intuition of the game design is to reflect the real-world everyday life of Asian people who live in America. As Asian students living in Los Angeles we actively take actions (e.g. walk in groups, get along with the neighborhood ) to keep ourselves safe, yet we still feel the uncertainty and threat every time we have to go out for different reasons.

Donate

Tragedies are inevitable although we try our best to help people avoid hate crimes by setting up this website. At the same time we are looking for more opportunities to help those unfortunate people to recover from traumatic experiences. Thus, we provided some victims’ information and their GoFundMe link for someone who wants to help them.

How we built it

For the frontend, we used HTML, CSS and JavaScript to write the website.

For the map part, we used ArcGIS’s online maps to visualize the occurrence of hate incidents. By clicking marked points on the map, the user can view the details of the real-world incidents that have happened in the sidebar. To support the map with required incident data, we scraped data from racismiscontagious.com and stored it in a .csv file. In the backend, we used Python to transform the csv data to the form of JSON. When sent to the frontend, the data is used to render the map.

For the discussion part, we allow anyone to leave a message. But the message will not be shown before we check it. This is because any negative or unkind discussion may hurt other website users. All discussions will be stored in the database.

For the game part, we used random events to decide today’s danger index. And different actions/events mapping to different gains or losing of HP. When the characters choose whether they would do this thing or not, their decisions affect whether they could survive or not. Based on the random function and condition statements, we can make this game work successfully.

For the donate part, we linked our website with GoFundMe to make it more convenient for people who want to donate money. The list of victims and links will be stored in the database.

Challenges we ran into

Framework

We tried to use React at first though none of our team members has experience in frontend development. It was painful for the first 6 hours then we realized that we couldn’t manage it within 24 hours. Though we switched to HTML later it was a great learning experience that we explored React and gained a sense of how it works.

Data Source

There was no API or any other open data source on incidents of Asian-American-targeted hate as we expected. Again, we should need knowledge in front-end web development to utilize the data from a website we found that collects and illustrates incident reports. Eventually this issue was solved by a hybrid method of human effort and programming.

First Hackathon

This is the very first time for all of our team members to participate in a hackathon. Due to the lack of previous experience and work to learn from, we need to build everything from scratch. Thus the time frame is quite tight and we have to arrange the process carefully.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

All team members learnt how to build a functional and stable frontend. Taking our lack of experience in this field into account, we believe that the final product is a convincing evidence of our progress!

Moreover, we are proud to look into the problem existing in our everyday life and try to provide a possible solution. We care for ourselves, the Asian community around us and the broader community of Asian people living across the United States. We believe that our project will inspire people from either inside or outside the Asian community to pay more attention to the hate crime problem and the social movements to stop Asian hate.

What we learned

We’ve learned how to complete a website and skills to beautify it. As CS/DS students who are always doing the backend/database coding and never got a chance to know frontend, this opportunity of doing this project helped me establish basic knowledge of frontend, which is beneficial for our study and future career. And it also helps us understand how to make a website look better.

We also learned how to get started quickly with new techniques. By looking into the official documents and live examples deployed on online sandbox, we got to know much more about JavaScript, ArcGIS, and communication between frontend and backend.

What's next for Stop Asian Hate - Map, Survival Game and Action

AthenaHacks is not the end of our concerns for the Stop Asian Hate movement and hate crimes. In the future we may continue our work on our website from the following perspectives.

We will connect a database to our website to support the features including incident data on the map, stored posts from the discussion board, victim and outralink data on the donate page, etc.. We haven’t done so because of some objective constraints (time, experience, etc.) but we believe it is a must as our website grows and we are capable of accomplishing this.
We plan to add more interactive functions to the map page as well as the discussion page.
The survival game will be polished to be more logical and engaging. The UI will be improved as well.
We would like to connect with some major organizations for Stop Asian/AAPI Hate movements. It would be helpful if we can share resources and collect incident reports collaboratively. Also, this will help to unite our community together and support our members.