Universal Footprint

Inspiration

Tech has many real world applications that do not affect the problem but affect the behavior of people which tackle the problem. My teammates and I were inspired to create such an application where we could encourage people to think more concretely about very large and distant ideas such as climate, sustainability, etc. Breaking it down into smaller, more practical and easier to tackle concepts is one of the main features of our application.

What it does

This web-based application prompts the user to input data that is used to calculate the carbon and water footprints based off formulas that were developed after extensive research. The data collected by the app is collected and applied in such a way that the final value calculated is universally applicable. It also makes use of google's API for geolocation, makes use of hyperlinks and websites developed to help save the environment.

How we built it

We setup a GitHub repository to be able to push and pull files amongst each other. We also setup the react.js framework and, using Visual Studio Code, wrote JavaScript code to run the calculations, APIs and all involved functions. Finally we used HTML and CSS for the UI of the front-end.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge that the team faced was deciding what language to proceed with because of a limited amount of tools at our disposal. For the first 6 hours, we were coding in C++, but then we faced an issue with a lack of frameworks that forced us to switch languages to JavaScript in order to make use of react. Going into the hackathon, none of us had any experience with JavaScript as well as HTML and CSS. There was also the fact that majority of us did not know how to use GitHub. The last 18 hours were spent frantically reading up on JavaScript and asking our mentors to help us learn how to use GitHub. We also had very little experience working as a team, and so, had to learn how to overcome any challenges presented.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learning a new computer language, as well as a markup language and how to use GitHub repositories, which are essential in team projects, are the accomplishments that we are most proud of. We were also able to learn to work as a team towards our shared goal.

What we learned

Learning a new computer language, as well as a markup language and how to use GitHub repositories. On top of that, working as a team and also how much fun hackathons are.