The Plight of the Piping Plover

An interactive story-driven web app for kids to learn about wildlife conservation and the threat of species extinction through the lens of the Piping Plover as it navigates its seasonal migration.

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Inspiration

As a group, we’re all very interested in green tech and harnessing computer science for sustainability and environmental conservation. We thought it was important to address a problem facing the Earth, and decided on endangered species and biodiversity. We also wanted to attack the issue from an educational perspective–kind of like a virtual, interactive museum exhibit! After flipping through a field guide, we settled on the Piping Plover due to its sensitive conservation status (there are only 8,400 individuals left in the wild) and charismatic yet adorable appearance.

What it does

The Plight of the Piping Plover illustrates a common narrative about wildlife conservation in the 21st century. As a team, we wanted to educate younger audiences about what they can do to help preserve our planet’s endangered species.

How we built it

We built our website using HTML/CSS to have more control of our design and gain new experiences. We built our websites from scratch without using any templates and shared our code with each other through GitHub/version control.

Challenges we ran into

  • Troubles navigating GITHUB/ the different branches
  • Attaching sound bytes to pictures
  • Starting from scratch without any templates
  • Having no prior knowledge of website design and development

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Going into this hackathon, our entire team of first-year, first-time hackers had minimal experience with working collaboratively on programming-based projects. Starting from scratch and making this website was an immense accomplishment for all of us, especially considering the multitude of development skills we learned in the process. This project is a culmination of the hard work that our team put into collaborating, innovating, and learning.

What we learned

We learned how to use a repository and collaborate on code through Git/GitHub. We learned the programming languages of HTML and CSS. We also gained more knowledge about wildlife conservation and the issues that species like Piping Plovers face today.

What's next for The Piping Plover Migration

This is just a small preview into one specific species that faces endangerment and environmental stressors caused by humans. In the future, we would love to include a variety of different species and a more robust choice framework to allow for more extensive gameplay. We would also like to extend this project to a larger audience by developing gameplay that can entertain all levels of understanding.

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