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Design on Figma
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Email sent through UW Safe & Ready
Inspiration
With the Waterloo region being a hotspot for COVID-19, it has been a difficult year for many. As incoming students at the University of Waterloo, we decided to build a program that helps inform people on up-to-date COVID-19 news. UWaterloo Safe & Ready is specifically designed for UW students, as we understand how challenging it can be to stay on top with COVID-19 news while balancing a heavy university workload.
What it does
Safe & Ready is an emailing service with a tool that gathers data from various news websites, allowing users to be a click away from receiving all the COVID-19 information they need to stay safe.
How we built it
To develop this project, we used Python and its well-known library, Beautiful Soup. Then, we created a website mockup using Figma as well as an actual prototype using HTML and CSS.
Challenges we ran into
Although we were able to learn HTML and CSS and apply those new skills to develop a web application, we were not able to create a fully responsive website, as it required JavaScript. Therefore, to overcome this challenge, we plan to familiarize ourselves with this language.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of our ability to build a program that successfully collects desired data from various websites and sends this information to users via email.
What we learned
Through XHacks, we learned how to do website scraping and development, strengthening our knowledge of Python as well as gaining experience in HTML and CSS for the first time. In the future, we hope to apply our skills to create solutions that will positively impact the world on an even grander scale!
What's next for UWaterloo Safe & Ready
Our next steps are to expand this service to Laurier University, or other universities in different cities, improve the functionality and design of our website, and send emails whenever there is an update, instead of sending them every 24 hours.
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