Carbon Garden
We were inspired by one of our favorite Chrome extensions, Forest! Forest is a way to stay focused in a pleasant way by utilizing trees that grow if the user is bored and wants to see a beautiful graphic while doing work, and die if the user enters a restricted entertainment site when they should be focusing.
The term carbon footprint has appeared in the news frequently with the explosion of information that has emerged about climate change. Carbon footprint is the overall amount of greenhouse gas emissions, consisting primarily of carbon dioxide, associated with an organization, event, or production. It is one of the most common measures of the effect of an individual, community, industry, or country on the environment. An increase in greenhouse gas emissions, and therefore in carbon footprint, is the primary event associated with climate change that has led to global warming. It is an extremely important world issue that our project, Carbon Garden, effectively addresses.
We created a quiz that calculates someone’s carbon footprint based on a series of easy questions, and our garden “grows” when the user is more environmental-friendly. The user can always go back and change their answers if they improved one or more lifestyle choices, and the garden will reflect that by “growing” more flowers!
Carbon Garden was built using various HTML, CSS, and JS files. Our quiz works with a Javascript backbone that adds EventListeners to all our HTML buttons and defines a click on each one as corresponding to a different “amount” of carbon footprint. At the end of the quiz, the points are tallied up and the user gets the results and is directed to go to the garden. The garden has a series of images that have href URLS that redirect the user to well-known blogs, news sites, and inspirational environmental activists that all give tips on how to reduce one’s carbon footprint and maximize wellness.
Because our team consisted of only high school students, we ran into some bugs, especially with the quiz, that we had to ask for the help of someone outside our team. We all had little-no experience with web development so it was hard at times but super fun! The mentors were extremely helpful (Thank you so much Leah, Victoria, Patricia, Sahana and Bori!) Also, because our team consisted of two members on the east coast and two members on the west coast, sometimes it was difficult to communicate and set time aside to work together.
TechTogether Boston was the first hackathon for a few of us, so we’re glad that we were able to create, finish, and submit a project so quickly! One thing we did well was planning; right from the start, we created a plan and assigned roles to each team member. With such a short time to complete a project, we believe this really helped us think realistically and have a finished project by the deadline. We’re all so proud of the way we worked as a team throughout the hackathon. We kept an open line of communication at all times and checked in with each other every once in a while. In our opinion, our final project is better than we ever expected it to be as first-time hackers!
We were able to learn a variety of things, from exploring JavaScript quizzes to animating CSS elements. The mentors gave us a lot of tips, including things that were hard to debug using the Internet! For example, how the simple placing of the linking of the Javascript file in the HTML could affect the entire program. Aside from that, it was some of our first times using a code collaboration site like repl.it and even though it crashed at times, it was a rewarding experience.
We would love to implement more questions to improve accuracy in calculating carbon footprint! We also want to save data using PHP/React/HTML forms in order to make it easier to update information, so users may create accounts and see their progress.