Sustainability Checker - Ralph Liniado, Yoav Ben-Bassat

Inspiration

We have desired a positive change for the environment. This makeathon has allowed us to utilize our coding skills to make a project that can bring awareness to people on how sustainable they really are.

What it does

We built a software which prompts users to answer questions on various daily activities they do. The program then runs back-end algorithms to calculate the carbon output of each activity and then gives the user a score on how sustainable they are. It also gives tips to improve sustainability.

How we built it

We built this program entirely using the Java programming language on VSCode. We utilized the "Live Share" extension in order to simultaneously work on the program together. We used Java GUI to help make the user interface.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into numerous challenges. At first we had lots of difficulty programming the buttons to actually perform different actions. For example, we ran into the problem of allowing the user to go back to a previous frame where they can change their answers. We also ran into the problem of error handling and requiring the user to input a preffered response (integer, char, etc).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were tremendously proud when we figured the problems with error handling. We were also proud of getting the buttons to work. Overall overcoming errors with our code is what made us the most proud, and being able to sit and code for such an extensive time really showed our ability to persevere.

What we learned

We learned many things from accomploshing this project. We got a lot better at Java GUI as this was the first time both of us have ever attempted to do something with it. Also allowing calculations to happen on the back-end as the user was prompted with the questions to answer was something we have done in school, but actually being able to work on a large project like this with no instructions was a huge learning curve.