Inspiration
The consequences of the gradual warming of our planet have already begun to affect communities around the world. Current energy usage, specifically because of our reliance on fossil fuels, is the most significant contributor to climate change. Despite the repercussions that would inevitably occur if we maintained our current relationship with energy, little governmental action has taken place to shift towards a more clean and renewable future. At Wellesley College there has been discussion of creating a more sustainable and renewable campus, and with the passing of the Wellesley Sustainability Plan in 2016, the college established concrete goals to be a more environmentally friendly campus. However, the college has not been held accountable and certain deadlines have already passed.
What it does
The purpose of our project is twofold. First off, we want to engage Wellesley students in a conversation about their individual energy usage, and make them more conscious of their role in preventing further climate change. We want to take advantage of the competitive nature of Wellesley's students by ranking them against their peers in a low-stress, fun way to see where they stand among the student population. Second, we hope that by building a framework to track energy consumption at the college, we can hold the school administration accountable to their promises and show them that there is student interest in a more sustainable future, if they choose to see it.
How we built it
We used html on glitch to code our website, and formatted and styled it with css. In addition, we used javascript to get input data from the user, and rank and display the standings.
Challenges we ran into
Both of us are first year students, and though we are interested in computer science, our technical backgrounds are limited. Neither of us have used Javascript, html, or css before, so there was definitely a learning curve when it came to actually implementing our ideas. In addition, the data we want to input does not actually exist due to the lack of metering on individual buildings at Wellesley College.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Despite these challenges, we're very proud of the idea we came up with because we feel that it's a very practical and effective way to both engage with the community and demonstrate student interest to Wellesley's administration. We're especially proud of how we overcame technical barriers, specifically with learning javascript, and with getting our website to format (which was unexpectedly frustrating and took much longer than we had anticipated).
What we learned
As stated above, we both learned a lot of technical skills with this project that, just hours prior, had seemed daunting and inaccessible to us both (particularly the idea of creating a website, essentially from scratch). We were also able to learn more about the origins of energy and its consumption at our college, which is something that impacts our everyday lives but is hard to think about the tangible effects of, but we learned a lot of technical skills.
What's next for Wellesley Energy Tracker
We're both very excited for taking our tracker out of the hackathon and back to Wellesley. We believe that this could actually create change at our school, which is known for being very passionate about and open to things like activism and student participation. We've both become frustrated with the Wellesley administration, and are looking forward to seeing what change we will be able to effect, in our energy usage, in the actions of the college, and in our school's culture.
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