# Inspiration
When presented with the theme of “Breaking Barriers”, both of us wanted to tackle a specific problem that both of use faced, and a common one we had was dealing with the taboo surrounding menstruation. Not only did we want to increase the education on menstruation to help other girls like us learn about their body, but we also wanted to increase the spotlight on the monetary hardships that many women have to face due to the large prices and taxes on menstruation. In the end, we came up with TTT: Tackling Tampon Tax, a website dedicated to educating youth on menstruation and period poverty through an interactive game, donation and pick up page for free products, menstruation cycle tracking page, and informational pages on products and taxes.
# What it does
A significant amount of money that women have to spend is dedicated towards the large costs of essential menstruation products. This cost is amplified due to the “tampon tax” that states inflict on period products. This cost disproportionately affects women, causing what is known as “period poverty.”
To break the monetary and societal barriers that many women face due to their menstruation, we present TTT: Tackling Tampon Tax. This website breaks barriers we face by discussing taboo topics, in terms of societal standards, and challenging the idea that products should be taxed by explaining the difficulties many face due to the products’ large prices. Furthermore, the website contains a database of donation sites and services and maps where people can easily find places near them to donate products. On top of that, to increase awareness of this issue, TTT contains a game which is a simulation that effectively shows how much money women have to pay for menstruation services, and shows the difficulty and barriers women have to jump over in their day to day lives due to this issue. To supply girls with necessary resources to help them through menstruation, our website also provides an informational page on different products and their costs, as well as a page for people to log in and track their menstrual cycle.
By combining educational services through an interactive game, tracker, donation pages with maps in an actual effort to reduce period poverty, this website proves its originality. In the end, TTT breaks and challenges the menstrual monetary barriers that us women have to face in our day to day lives
# How we built it
As we wanted to develop a website, we utilized the programming languages of HTML and CSS to design and style it, and we used Javascript to program the logic behind the donation page and the game. As we were a team, we utilized GitHub and git commands to collaborate together on the project.
To ensure user compatibility, our website utilizes arrows and scroll bars to help the user navigate through a page. On top of that, we utilize an effective navigation bar at the top that users can click on to switch from page to page. The color palette we utilize enhances the professionalism and branding of the website, providing the user comfort in viewing and navigating throughout it.
In our website, we utilized multiple different components, such as having multiple different pages, including a navigation bar, text boxes, buttons, labels, scrollbars, and clickable and non-clickable images. Our website proves it complexity by incorporating informational pages, location and map services, a game, and a period tracker calendar. We incorporated multiple programming languages together to complete this hack, and effectively combined the back-end benefits of Javascript to create the logic of the game as well as the front-end benefits of HTML and CSS to style and place it on the screen.
# Challenges we ran into
Before this hackathon, we only had the knowledge of basic topics within HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Through this hackathon, we had to learn the more advanced concepts of this programming language to be able to effectively program a professional website. On top of learning these languages while programming a website, we also ran into the challenges of producing the game, tracker, and signing in and out on a website. Prior to this hack, we only knew how to program games through the usage of Java, but as we wanted to implement the game on a website, we had to learn how to program games through Javascript. Through our tracker, we had to learn how to create a calendar and apply logic to predict the user’s menstrual cycle. We faced many difficulties in incorporating a database to store logging in information of the users, which was necessary to do for the tracker.
# Accomplishments that we're proud of
With this hackathon, we are proud of the game that we have implemented and the multiple different components we have implemented, in regards to the lack of advanced experience we had prior to this hackathon. We are also proud of being able to create the logging in and logging off, as that was an incredibly big challenge to overcome. We are also proud of being able to successfully tackle barriers by creating a solution to the menstrual inequalities we face.
# What we learned
Not only did we learn the vast applications of HTML, CSS, databases, and Javascript in creating a highly interactive website, but we also learned more about period poverty and tampon tax, and hope to educate others on this as well through this project.
# What's next for TTT: Tackling Tampon Tax
In the future of our game, we plan on implementing a feature that gives users’ directions to the closest donation location near them, and not just the maps and a list of all the locations near them. To increase accessibility of this project, we can also convert this website into an app so that users can utilize the services easily on their own phone.
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