#Scientrist

Inspiration

We were inspired by Reddit's "#TIL" subreddit. We wanted to tackle the education problem by solving the problem of lack of interest in science, and we felt that interesting #TIL facts would be a great interest stimulator.

What it does

It prints a live stream of tweets from popular scientists and allows users to toggle which scientists to stream/block.

How we built it

We used Twitter's Streaming API and Bootstrap for the web app. We coded everything in Javascript/HTML/CSS.

Challenges we ran into

The first challenge was that we had to create something that is education themed. Since random trivia isn't exactly considered to be education, we decided to increase interest in science and similar subjects via interesting tweets from popular science figures.

We also could not figure out exactly how we wanted to allow users to toggle the scientists.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Successfully using Twitter's Streaming API and making d3.js data visualization examples.

What we learned

We learned more about Twitter's API, d3.js data visualization, and using node.js packages with MeteorJS

What's next for #Scientrist

We plan to add more options for users to stream from other social media feeds and to search for specific terms of interest. We also plan to add user accounts to allow custom profiles and news feeds from other interesting science sources, not just twitter.

Built With

• css
• html
• javascript
• meteor.js
• twitter