Elements_Info

Inspiration

The periodic table is long and irregular, difficult to memorize, and sometimes it takes too much work to go through each row to find the element you want. And if you want more information after that, you would still need to go online and search up the element. So we thought that it would be a good idea to concentrate all the information so that when the user inputs the atomic number of the element it will tell the user information about that element.

What it does

It prompts the user for an atomic number between 1 and 118 (if user input is not between 1 - 118 or not an integer it would tell the user and automatically restart). Then it would display basic information about the element, it’s name, symbol, atomic number, and atomic mass. It then asks the user if they want more information on the element. If the user’s response is yes then it would display its type, number of protons, neutrons, when it was discovered and by whom. It then asks the user if they want to test another element, program end if they respond no, and repeats if they respond yes.

How I built it

We used Python, input and output are done on a console. The program reads the information from a file and delivers it to the user. This assures that the program runs quickly opposed to how long it would’ve taken if we have used if statements to test each element.

Challenges I ran into

One of the challenges we had was to gather all the information for all the elements. It took a while and some team members started to lose hope since there was so much. We also tried to incorporate the program into an app or a website but ultimately failed since it is very difficult to incorporate a Python program into a website or app.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are proud that we as three relatively beginners to programming was able to use the limited information we know to create a program that can benefit users and be practical.

What I learned

We learned a lot through this Hackathon, that even though our knowledge is limited, there’s still countless possibilities that we can create. We did run into some trouble that we had to research though, like reading from a file or throwing out exceptions. We also learned through the submission process how to upload programs to Github so it can be seen by all.