We are a team of 4 first year student developers who collaborated to create a website that displays the information about air quality.
The inspiration for this project was the recent wildfires in Canada, which have polluted and damaged the air quality throughout the world. With this website, we strive to raise awareness of the environment, which has been getting damaged throughout the years, and educate people about the air quality.
It shows the air quality data of any location worldwide requested by the client. The data includes Carbon Monoxide, Nitrogen Dioxide, Ozone, Sulphur Dioxide, and Particulate Matter 2.5 and 1.0.
This website is built using HTML and Bootstrap for the front end and JavaScript and Air Quality by API-Ninja for the back end. We divided the work and had different members work on different parts of the code. By doing so, we had to communicate with other teammates about the code we were working on, the different ideas we had, and the challenges we encountered.
During the hackathon, we encountered many challenges. At first, one challenge that we encountered was coming up with ideas. Since it was the first hackathon for most of us, we did not know what to expect. After coming up with an idea, we encountered many more problems. First, we encountered the problem of learning JavaScript. Although some of us had experience with JavaScript and HTML, we also had some members not familiar with these languages and the usage of APIs. However, after this hackathon, we believe that this has been a learning experience for everyone and an experience that enhanced our technical and communication skills.
As a beginner-friendly group, we were able to create a fully functioning air-indexing website that contributes to sustainability and environmental purposes. Furthermore, we are proud that we were able to work effectively as a team and enhance our technical abilities.
We learned how to use APIs more effectively as well as the value of collaboration between team members and learned how to communicate our work.
In the future, we want to implement features that also raise awareness for the environment. Some examples are displaying plastic usage from all around the world and garbage detection. We also want find ways to further optimize our code, reducing the amount of energy required to run the code, which will help the environment.