Inspiration
Every year, we pay state taxes, federal taxes, college tuition, and donate to charity. However, instead of just mindlessly opening up our wallets, shouldn't we get to know how these institutions spend our money? Transparency is incredibly important in our society, and with all the information on the Internet, we really should be better informed about how these things work.
What It Does
Frost provides a clean, user-friendly interface that reveals how your selected institution will spend your money. Just pick which establishment you just gave your money to, and enter the dollar amount. Frost will produce a pie chart that shows how your money will be allocated.
How We Built it
We used HTML/CSS/Javascript to build our website, and used Flask (Python) to run the backend of our website. The majority of the CSS for our website was from a template taken from HTML5 UP. For our pie charts, we used a javascript library called D3. In order to generate the pie charts for our project, we first read data inputted by the user through a form. Then, when the form is submitted, a javascript function calculates values from the input and generates a pie chart to show where and how much money is going to each part of an institution.
Challenges We Ran Into
We had trouble getting POST, GET operations for the form on our website to work with our backend files. Although we eventually figured out how to send the form data to our backend file and back, we elected to use Javascript at the end because we were more familiar with it. We also had several minor issues, including getting a good-looking dropdown option and getting numbers to show up correctly on the pie chart.
Accomplishments That We're Proud Of
As first-time users of Flask and D3, we are proud of how we were able to use them to build our website. We are also proud of our demo video’s and website’s aesthetically-pleasing designs.
What We Learned
We learned how to use D3 to create pie charts and developed a deeper understanding of Python, HTML, CSS, and Flask. We also experienced some problems with Git that taught us to be more comfortable with it. In D3, we learned some new coding techniques (although specific to the library) such as method chaining that make previously redundant code more concise.
What's Next for Frost
Our next step would be to add data for more institutions. After building an extensive database, another goal would be to add a comparison tool so that users can compare how different institutions would allocate their funds.
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