Hurrikane

Inspiration

The inspiration behind the project was reading the question, how does natural disasters affect housing and real estate. The mini-game's inspiration came from a tornado and house it goes around and destroys houses.

What it does

The project, Hurrikane, compares different aspects of pricing/costs for a home and the years before, after, and during a natural disaster, more specifically Hurricane Katrina. Additionally, there is a mini-game that pretends the user is escaping a tornado-like figure.

How we built it

The app is built off of NextJS using TypeScript, for displaying the data, we used ChartJS, which is a simple Javascript library that allows you to create simple modern charts given data. We acquired our data from the spreadsheets that we were given from Fannie Mae, in addition to doing our own research to gather additional data we could compare from the hurricane.

Challenges we ran into

Our first issue that we ran into when starting this project was how to get data on the pricing of the houses. To solve it, we first tried google and finding some apis that would allow us to easily connect to the housing market and calculate, but after many failed old apis later, we stumbled upon asking a mentor. We asked one of the sponsors from Fannie Mae at around 11pm right before he was about to leave. We simply asked, where can we find data and we asked what he thought about our idea for our original question. He told us we should just sit down for a couple hours and just look at all of the data we are given. So we did that. We looked at all of the data, and while we only spent an hour looking for some relations, it was exactly what he was talking about. We had found our first thing that we wanted to show and compare on the app, as we started adding it, we found more and more things that would come along with these things that were affected in the housing market.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

In the beginning of the project, especially, it was difficult to think of a project that would correctly fit the prompt/challenge while also corresponding with the other track(s). However, we were determined to make our idea work and continued working on it until we got our finished product. On a bit of a personal note, we are proud that we were able to learn a new framework, NextJS, which is similar to React because of its components, but is still a new model that we are proud for learning from this event.

What we learned

How to use NextJS, different real estate terms and how they are affected by natural disasters, how to incorporate ChartJS to making charts in Typescript/Javascript