actAtion

Inspiration

We were inspired after one of our school's made a racial change in their grading policy. Many students that I knew wanted to give feedback about this policy change, but didn't after experiencing the inconvenience of finding who to send the feedback to. I realized that my peers would have summited feedback if there was a more convenient solution.

What it does

actAtion is a service that automatically sends a message to school policymakers. It is designed to be very convenient and easy to use. The student/parent can send a message by selecting their school on actAtion, and then they can type their message. actAtion is able to automatically send the email containing the message to the school, meaning that the only thing you need to send a message is your school and the message itself.

How we built it

We built it by creating a web application. We made the web application by using regular JS and bootstrap. We also used Google's Gmail API in order to automatically send messages.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was the lack of experience of working on web applications. Both of us had very little experience creating web applications, and we were going to have to do it in 2 days. In addition, we only had 2 people in our group as well, so each of us was going to have to spend a lot of time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite all of our disadvantages, the two of us managed to create a search with autocomplete, learn JS, solve difficult setbacks such as having to rewrite our original email solution, and create a working prototype and a 8 minute presentation - all in 2 days. In addition, we worked really well together during this process.

What we learned

We learned a lot about making a web app and working quickly.

What's next for actAtion

We plan to improve the UI and implantation of the current features. We will then focus on making our product more scalable as it grows, such as getting a new email solution. We also plan to add more features to make actAtion more convenient for students and schools (e.g easy email sorting for schools).

Built With

• bootstrap
• css
• google-gmail-oauth
• html5
• javascript