CarciCare

Carci Care: We care in detecting Carcinogens

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Inspiration

Our inspiration was mainly due to our own identities and experiences. Two of us on the team have a family history of cancer and have or have had family with cancer. We were really compelled by the death of our loved ones who fell to cancer, and wanted to develop a tool to help prevent cancer. We were also inspired by our own school, carcinogens is a topic we learn in biology as freshmen, so when the topic of health came to mind, a project with carcinogens was one of the ideas that popped out as unique. With these

What it does

Our project is about measuring the risk of carcinogens within an area by getting an address and identifying the air quality and amount of sunlight within the area, and if we had more time we would have liked to add stuff such as a calculator for a healthier diet based on budget and water quality within the given area. The overall objective of the project is to help users become aware of the risk of cancer due to the conditions in their area. As well as educating them more on the science behind cancer and how to reduce their own risk of cancer.

How we built it

For the front end of our website, we used CSS and HTML to style our website. Then using Javascript and ReactJS, we built functions for the back end which received data from the input from the HTML input section for the address and using Google Maps API, we were able to find the current air quality and weather in that area. From there we would use the data to determine whether or not there was a high amount of carcinogens, "a substance, organism or agent capable of causing cancer", in the area.

Challenges we ran into

At first, coming up with the prompt was fairly difficult, because there are so many fields and topics in health, that it was hard to pick just one. Then after about 30 minutes of brainstorming, we decided on our current website idea. Working with Google API was extremely difficult, as we had little to no prior knowledge of how to use APIs, and it was hard to understand it enough to fully implement it into our website. Some of the parts we just could not get a hang of due to Using HTML and CSS was also a bit of a struggle, as there were some times when our code was just not working as intended, the same went for ReactJS, sometimes our code refused to work. Due to a lack of non-school computers, we also had to take a detour from our original plan which was to use NodeJS as the backend and ReactJS as the front end. However, we adapted by only using ReactJS since NodeJS wasn't able to function on the school computers.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're mainly proud for being able to learn JS which was a completely new language for some of us. We were also proud of being able to gain the experience to learn new things. Overcoming some of the stuff that wasn't working, such as an incorrectly placed button, bad formatting, and some API stuff was really what makes us proud to participate in this year's hackathon. The rush of overcoming our obstacles was really a pushing factor in making us more motivated to do more. We are also proud of coming together to work as a group, we've never really worked for this long before, and we each have different skills as well as our flaws, so learning to work with these factors made not only for a good bonding experience, but allowed us to learn how to communicate better with each other. Building teamwork skills is probably the most important thing that we feel proud of.

What we learned

As mentioned in the previous question, developing our teamwork skills is one of the best things we've taken away from this competition. As for technical skills, learning to work better and more in depth with CSS and HTML was also a great deal of knowledge, as well as learning how to work with API and React for the first time, we have never really worked with API and/or ReactJS, so while learning to work with these tools was really frustrating, but also rewarding in the sense that we are now able to better build websites in the future from the obstacles during this hackathon.

What's next for CarciCare

For our project, "CarciCare", if we do gain the proper resources, we plan to develop it even further by even considering more factors such as diet, water quality in the area, and even hereditary factors. With these factors, I believe making a better well-tailored plan to reduce the risk of cancer for users would be a more attainable goal. It would help and educate millions across the world and tailor a plan to help reduce cancer, it could potentially be one of the only life-saving websites.

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