Inspiration
The goal of our project was to make something that raises awareness of the environmental impact of everyday life. We hope to inspire other to build habits that are better for the environment.
What it does
Our project is a website that prompts the user to take a survey about everyday habits. When the user completes the quiz their results are displayed as well as data about other people who have taken the survey.
There are five sections that are analyzed: Diet, Transportation, Consumption, Utilities, and Overall. The users averages for each of these categories is calculated and displayed, as well as the minimum, maximum, and mean of the other contributors of the survey. This allows the users to compare their lifestyle/habits to other people and see where they could improve if they strive to be more environmentally friendly.
How we built it
Process
To begin our project we decided to make a google form with all the questions that would later appear on the website. We sent this survey out to family, friends, and colleges to create a starting database for us to use. We chose to do this to make the results more accurate and to have a database to test our backend algorithms with before the website was running.
Frontend
One of our team members, Annie Rudnick, worked on the website using HTML and CSS. She created a survey page and results page.
Backend
Another team members, Ernie Duckworth, worked on the backend. He used Python to read from the database (CSV file) and process the data to find means, minimums, maximums, as well as other methods to calculates if the user is above average for a category.
API
We had the last two team members, Wyatt Poulos and Megan Booher, develop the API. We chose to have these team members do the API because they had more experience with the technology. They used Flask to connect the Python backend to to the HTML frontend.
Challenges we ran into
To begin with, none of our programmers knew the language they were developing in. There was a big learning curve for everyone and that caused us to start developing later than we had hoped, because we all needed to do research.
When it came to starting development it became clear that there was a gap in planning. This caused some members to hop between jobs before getting anything done and overall held the team back.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
All of us are proud of the fact that we worked with a language or tool that we were inexperienced with and we managed to teach ourselves enough to create a super cool project. We were proud of how much we accomplished on the first day alone.
What we learned
As a team, we all learned a lot about project planning and management. We learned how important it is to have consistent communication with team members to make sure everyone is on the same page. For a lot of our members, this was the first time they have made a project as a team, as a result they learned what it looks like to be on a team.
As for technology, many of us were first introduced to GitHub. We used this platform to compile everyones code. Annie Rudnick learned a lot about web development with HTML and CSS. Ernie learned about Pythons and reading from CSV files. Megan and Wyatts learned about the Python Flask API.
What's next for Eco-Nerds
Eco-Nerds had a great time completing this project and we look forward to other experiences like this. Next up we would like to figure out how to host our website on our school Computer Science machines so other people can view this project.
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