Inspiration behind WeatherAlterMath
On August 16th, I woke up to a thunderous sound. The windows were rattling, and as I pulled aside the drapes, I was greeted by a bright instance of lightning that ran from the atmosphere down to the ground. I was entranced, and motionless as I watched the thunderstorms rage on. After some time, I felt tired, and without thinking much about what I just saw I went to bed.
Two days later after that fateful night, I saw the sun was a bright pink color and an enormous wildfire raging just a couple miles from where I currently live. My family and I didn’t know what to do; we couldn’t decide if we should evacuate, stay home, or if the air outside was safe to breathe. Just overall the total lack of information and panic we endured struck the most fear in our hearts, as we saw the same behavior as our own in our neighbors. Maybe I thought, we should have been informed sooner about this, as the wildfires appear to us to become more ominous than before.
As time passed, I began to think about this idea and hope to make it into something more meaningful. To make an application or website that can help people make decisions and practice safe behaviors during events such as the one I recently have faced. Everyone deserves the chance to become prepared, ready, and know what to do when a weather phenomenon happens. One source of information that is readily accessible for all the information they need would serve them well. To protect the lives of many in our present will serve society well in the future.
So, now I and my teammates got this idea of creating a weather alert website called Weather AlterMath. We discussed what kind of features, information, and other resources it could have about wildfires and similar weather events. We worked on creating the website and helped build a prototype version of it. As we updated the website, it will contain information about wildfires, location weather by region, safety tips during weather events, and emergency contacts. We want to help develop the website in order to mainly teach younger children important safety information about wildfires and other such weather events. WeatherAltermath will provide fun and informative tools and resources for both kids and adults of all ages. It will have fun and relaxing tools and games and have links to resources such as art, music, exercise, and more. Overall, the purpose of this website is to help bring more positive reinforcement for residents and other users. We want to help people be informed and practice safe behavior during wildfires and other such weather phenomena.
How does your project come under the Community and Fun-Games track? WeatherAlterMath comes under the section “Community and Fun Games” since it includes a list of resources pertaining to games and activities designed to teach about wildfires and similar weather events. Kids will enjoy the websites since there would be a dedicated section of the game and other tools for them to enjoy. There is an emphasis on education, preparedness, and fun in this project. The website aims to teach users of all ages in a fun, rewarding manner. Kids would enjoy the games and resources offered by the websites, while older kids and adults would enjoy the chat feature and information display about wildfires and how to prepare for such events.
Description of the project
WeatherAftermath is a website application aimed at residents for staying alert and informed about current weather alerts and resources to stay safe and active. It contains resources and information aimed at residents to maintain safe behavior during weather events and to be informed in a stimulating, and enjoyable manner.
How does your project give a positive impact on society?
WeatherAltermath is a website project aimed at helping people to become informed about wildfires and similar weather events. It seeks to help educate and thus help guide people to safe behaviors and actions during weather events such as wildfires. It can be as simple as helping people stay safe during wildfires, earthquakes, and other such happenings. That helping save lives is a direct, positive impact on society. Furthermore, in developing a more specialized website aimed at alerting people of wildfires and more, people would be more prepared and have more time to react in protecting themselves and their families. This information would be greatly beneficial to people around the world, as higher temperatures can lead to more wildfires and similar weather events in their local regions.
Improving the websites to have information about wildfires in other countries such as Australia would lead to a larger impact on society. That it would inform other users about wildfires outside the United States, and help them to decide if they should volunteer or donate to organizations involved in helping people during wildfires. More volunteering and donations will leave a positive impact on these regions. In this website, we would also discuss animal rescue and adoption as a result of these wildfires.
Did our web site provide volunteer opportunities to students and adults?
Our website includes a section that decided to help users become volunteers. First, on this specific volunteer page, we discuss the benefits to society volunteers bring to communities such as helping communities and fulfilling necessary roles. Second, we include resources to help people become volunteers through hyperlinks to external websites such as the Red Cross. Finally, the webpage also discusses how people can be virtual volunteers through websites such as Meetup.com.
What it does
Weather Aftermath is a website designed to help people primarily to know about local weather alerts and be informed of what to do during a weather event such as wildfires and earthquakes. It provides a fun and informative way for young children and people of all ages to learn about wildfires. It has plenty of features that inform and entertain.
This website provides local regional weather information for users such as temperature. It also has information about wildfires, weather alerts, and emergency contact information for users of certain regions. Users can also chat about current weather events with other users, and learn tips about how to prepare, endure, and act when faced with wildfires. This application also has games and tools for younger children to help take off their minds from current weather events.
How we built it
We build with HTML5, Javascript,CSS and some API.
Challenges we ran into
We faced as a team was coordinating and adjusting to the amount of effort and time to make sure our code was functional and complete. There was a significant amount of time spent double-checking, and at one point, we had to start over with a different framework to complete this project. Many times, we face significant challenges that delay or completely stop projects which lead to discouragement. Still, when dealing with a passion project or work that must be complete, it is best for everyone to keep pushing through and finish the work to the best of your abilities.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The accomplishment we are most proud of is able to code such a complicated web app such as this project. This application requires many systems to function properly, and as such can be quite an issue to keep tracking in coding and testing such function.
What we learned
What we learned most of this project is how to communicate properly about cementing design and the main goal of the project. Wherever a team comes together to work on something from scratch, many ideas, suggestions, and desires are placed into the center of the conversation. More team members can mean more different visions for the project, which requires concrete discussions of what is the main purpose of the project and how to decide on roles for which team members and the workload for each person.
What's next for WeatherAlterMath
We want to develop this website even further with additional features. One possible feature I have discussed with other team members is adding a texting feature related to the weather alerts we feature on the web site. If a certain weather alert is active for certain areas, we want users who register with the website to receive a text about a current weather alert. At this moment, we want this feature only to affect users who register their cell phone numbers on their accounts. We are not currently planning to make a general alert system for entire regions. Besides this, we would want to discuss and implement more features as we created and maintain this website.
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