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Carbon Footprints in Wonderland!
As CO2 emissions is on the rise, it is important to track our carbon footprint to help us understand the impact of our activities on the environment and further motivate us to take actions to reduce our emissions. This can help to mitigate climate change and its effects on the planet. It can also help us make more informed decisions about our lifestyle choices and encourage us to adopt more sustainable behaviors. As individuals who are quite interested in environmental studies, we wanted to shed awareness on the aspects of our life that can increase our carbon footprints so that we can provide tips on how to reduce it. Thus, this served as our inspiration for this project.
The Mad Hatter's Mad Questionnaire calculates a person's carbon footprint using the responses to a series of well researched questions. We give the user feedback accordingly on how high/low the carbon footprint and show what specifically caused a high value. This in turn prompts the output of a tips section on what the user can do to reduce their carbon footprint or congratulates them on doing certain activities that help keep the carbon footprint lower.
We used an online IDE called replit to collaborate and code together in java. We used sources such as StackOverFlow and W3Schools to build this project. Additionally the Nature Conservancy website aided us in calculating the carbon footprint so that we could ask the user questions/give feedback accordingly.
At first coming up with a project idea was very difficult because we had a lot of team members with great ideas and were unsure of what we wanted to move forward it. Once we delved into our project, we did run into a few more challenges as our code had bugs in it. One of our major issues was that our program kept skipping questions, denying the user from choosing an option. Formatting was also an issue as we have a lot of text the user has to read, solely because we made an educational questionnaire.
We are thrilled and happy that we were able to track the carbon footprint of a user and give prompts on how the user can reduce their carbon footprint by bringing changes into certain areas of their daily lifestyle. We wanted the questionnaire to be straightforward and user friendly, and we believe our questions provide that. The large text sections were a bit overwhelming at first, but using dividers we separated it to make it easier to read and are satisfied with the outcome.
Some of our team members were not as aware about carbon footprints and its impact on our lives and climate. This allowed us to gain more knowledge as we learned how to research carbon footprint and ask questions to determine how high/low a person’s carbon footprint is.
Our first step moving forward will be to perfect our questionnaire even more. This means making it even more user friendly, asking more specific questions. We could add more tips and even go as far as to extend towards focusing on other environmental factors as well as carbon footprints. Furthermore, we want to pitch this to the University and institutions who are raising awareness in environmental issues. We’ll use this as a stepping stone to do more projects that combat issues like this around the world.
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