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my profile tab
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home page
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navigation bar
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home page scrolled
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games tab
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community tab
What inspired us
My team were deeply moved by the effects of climate change in our area. Michigan has been experiencing increasingly severe snowstorms, which we believe is a direct result of our changing climate. These intense weather events have had a significant impact on our local community, and have motivated us to take action to address the root causes of climate change and bring awareness to other environmental problems including pollution, deforestation, and lack of freshwater.
What it does
EcoU is an online platform dedicated to educating and encouraging the community to take action towards mitigating environmental issues. Some major environmental issues are pollution, deforestation, or climate change, we provide a collaborative space for individuals to come together and make a difference.
With the ability to add friends and join organization profiles, our users become part of a larger community focused on cleaning our earth. Our interactive map allows users to report areas in need of attention, such as cleanups, and our platform enables users to post and interact with other people's activities.
There are also webpages located in the navigation bar including games, ads, and information pages. The games tab include minigames which users can play while also learning about environmental concerns such as pollution and deforestation. An ads page was created in our website in order to get users to click on the ads, which gives EcoU the funds in order to be able to donate to environemental organizations to make a change. For example, planting a tree.
How we built it
In order to create our website, we utilized front end development techniques with HTML and CSS. We incorporated a BING Maps API through the link provided by Microsoft. By following their resources, we successfully integrated our BING key into our code. Additionally, we used a geolocation tutorial from w3 schools, which prompts users to share their location with our website. All of these elements combines allowed us to create an interactive map where users can report areas in need of attention and contribute to our community's efforts to mitigate environmental issues. These are the links we used. BIngMapKey. MicrosoftTutorial. Geolocation
Challenges we ran into
None of my group members have even heard about what an API was before. Our first challenege was incorporating a Bing Map API with no prior experience. Luckily, we talked to multuple technical mentors that provided us resources and explained to us the API concept. We were able to look at Microsoft's tutorial and make our own bing maps key.
Another challenge was creating helpful graphics for th presentation. Everyone was preoccupied with our own roles and building the website. We were able to overcome this by coming together as a group and helping one another.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
One accomplishment and takeway from this hackathon was learning and impleting an API. We see how this can be useful to our future techinal projects as me may need a Spotify API and many more.
We are also proud of our website's over all design. We have the basic elements of a website including our own LOGO, navigation bar, and working webpages within the navigation bar.
We are also proud of our personalized logo for EcoU. Our team member Fatima Qasem used Adobe After Effects in order to create a 3D Earth design and insert our platform name.
What we learned
We learned how to make an API, allow user to mark a pin on an interactive map, and push our code on VS code to git.
What's next for EcoU
A potential plan for EcoU is to further develop it over the summer. A project is to get a domain and get multiple people to access the code in order to make sure one person can view another person's pins, posts, etc.
Along with this, my team and I will need to promote our platform on social media apps such as instagram, tiktok, etc. so that we have an audience.
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