Inspiration
Growing up, our favorite part of going back to school was the back school shopping. As we’d reminisce over the glittery pens and colorful notebooks, those dreams would often come to a halt when our parents would pull out “the box.” This box, smudged with waxy crayons, contained used school supplies – sticker-residue stained folders, half-used notebooks, small sharpened pencils, etc. We often resented our parent’s frugality, but we’ve realized they didn’t have the option to buy us new school supplies. This is not an unfamiliar scenario for many low-income families around the world. In New York 2010, the average cost of school supplies ranged from $21 to over $135 per student. It's only gotten higher since. We know how difficult it is to afford a brand new graphing calculator or even a notebook. So, our mission is to help students get the supplies they need this fall.
What it does
We help spread awareness and resources of what the school supply gap is and how to help the cause. There are many links to our website that leads to different organizations and places where you are able to donate money too. There are also resources for those who are in need of school supplies! We also include small interactive activities so users understand how serious this issue actually is
How we built it
We used three different languages, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to build our website (through repl.it).
Challenges we ran into
One challenge that we ran into is how to format our website. Since this was a very big project, we had a hard time with CSS because we had to make sure that the website was accessible while also being in the same format. Another challenge that we had was coding in javascript because the booleans would not work at times. Sometimes we had to entire blocks of code because we didn't like the outcome at the end or the code would not work!
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are most proud of how we coordinated our project in such a short time and how the result of our website is so impactful and outstanding. Our planning behind this project really benefited us tremendously and made the building of our website easygoing. Another one of our accomplishments is building the interactive features in our website. We think that they brought our website together and made it even more fun!
What we learned
We've learned that getting the basic school supplies is a privilege. In terms of coding, we've learned how to create interactive quizzes using Javascript – variables, "addEventsListener", printing statements, etc.
What's next for The Pencil Project
We would like to utilize different features in our website to make our website more beneficial to anyone in need of school supplies. For example, adding a locator so that people can find drives near them. We'd love to utilize forms and take user inputs to send to our political representatives so we can create direct changes in our local school districts. We'd also like to add a donation form so that we could give back to our community. Lastly, we'd want to reach out to more people so that we could create our own drive-in NYC!
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