Summary
My project will focus on the expenses of attending college, broken down into sections. It will analyze how much the cost of tuition has gone up (or down) in real money and accounting for inflation. This will be compared with the cost of college 30 years ago, when many current college students’ parents attended. This will be national statistics. Cost for the current will also be broken down to address housing, textbooks, tuition and transportation, focusing on state universities and college. Comparison of cost between now and the past will focus on tuition only. To show the current statistics, I will make an interactive map of the main Florida 4-year public and private colleges (UF, FSU, USF, UCF, UMiami, FIU, FAU, UNF, UWF, FAMU, New College, etc.) There will also be an interactive quiz where people can select a college and input their expenses to calculate the cost of college.
Week 1, Nov. 20-26
I will start to gather all of the data and link the pages in the HTML documents. I will make the charts showing the difference between the costs of college over the last 30 years. I will also start making the quiz questions with the buttons, though the JavaScript to push the page down will not be active yet.
Once jQuery is added in later, the map will be hidden until people scroll down past the first chart.
Week 2, Nov. 27-Dec. 3
I will collect data for most 4-year public and private colleges in Florida, putting that information on an interactive chart of the state and plugging in that data to the quiz, allowing it to factor into the quiz-takers’ cost of college.
Week 3, Dec. 4-10
In the last week, I’ll finalize the CSS to make it look pretty (and knowing my eye for color run it by several people). I’ll finish the html quiz form to make it jump down to the next part of the quiz after an answer is given. I’ll double check all of the math to make sure numbers are being added properly and add a section where people can input the amount of financial aid they’re receiving to subtract from the final cost.