WowMap

A world map of women in technology - be inspired by role models across the globe!

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Inspiration

Inspired by the Women in STEM issue raised by JP Morgan - we discussed ways to showcase women in STEM careers. We thought it would be nice to provide a platform which shows the women working in STEM by their area as a place to see the differences across the world and find role models. Also we thought this could include historical role models.

What it does

WowMap is a web app that uses google maps to display data on women in technology and STEM careers and their locations across the world. Using the app people who identify as women can add their details to the map to drop a pin in their location.

How we built it

We built a reactive map using the google api and meteor. This pulls information from a database (mongoDB) that contains geographic data on women in tech which places pins on the map to display them, this can then be added to through the form on the page. Each addition results in a new pin on the map.

Challenges we ran into

Learning meteor (it's magical world of joyfulness and tears), mongoDB and erm almost everything for this hack from scratch on the go! We are not web developers and some of us have not even worked with JavaScript before! It was a steep learning curve but fun.... Also one team member was severely ill all day Saturday and was AFK as a result.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have a map - wahey! We learnt how to populate it and we created a front end form for submitting new data - whoop! Basically making it work - we are super proud of that.

What we learned

Meteor does fun things to CSS.... How to use Meteor.. (kind of - it's still a mystical entity) How to submit and make API calls for the google maps API How to build meteor apps and locally host them... (mystical entity aside) Creating forms in HTML, CSS & JS

What's next for WowMap

Make it more interactive - i.e. get bios to display for each of the women (as an optional feature), have a historic search function, search by area (not just dragging around the map).

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