charinator

Inspiration

There are a hundreds of charities to donate to in the modern world. We see countless adverts on TV about clean water, vet care, refugee help etc. and most of us care about these issues. Where do we even begin to think about what charities to donate to? That's where the inspiration for charinator comes in! An akinator inspired program, we utilise information from the user's personality and interests gathered from a multitude of questions to best direct you towards what charities would be most fulfilling for you to give to!

What it does

The program takes an input file containing a list of charities and their attributes (size, who they focus on, what type of charity work they carry out, etc..) and arranges them into an arrayList with each charity as a object in the array, (with extra time, we would like to do something similar for the questions), it asks the questions and remembers the answer to shortlist which charities best fit the user; listing top charities with the most attributes matching the answers to the questions.

How we built it

Using Java, we created a program that reads an input file, (we plan with more time to have it so that it may also read an input file containing the questions and valid answers but due to time constraints we hardcoded a set of questions for the demo). The program relies on 3 additional classes on top of the main class, the charity class creates an object containing the charities name plus it's attributes, the pair class keeps track of how many attributes each charity has matching the user's answers and the question class creates an object containing a question and its valid answers. The program finishes by listing in order the top 3 most relevant charities to the user's answers.

Challenges we ran into

We've experienced several challenges that we were unused to, for everyone the online nature of the hackathon made it much harder to consolidate our work and assist each other in the team, the difference in time zones also made it hard to work together efficiently and without delays. Additionally, for many in the team downloading issues, technical problems and a lack of experience with certain applications such as react and flutter lead to the team having to make unforeseen amendments to the plan after costly delays and little progress.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Given the remote nature of this years hackathon, we are very proud of the accomplishments achieved in this hack, successfully coordinating a team project with members thousands of mile away, as well as juggling the different time zones added a new layer of new challenges which we've overcome.

What we learned

We've all gained knowledge through the mutual sharing of knowledge over Java, GitHub and other aspects.

What's next for charinator

We intend to drastically increase the number of charities and questions incorporated into the charinator program, once a much larger data set has been acquired for the program we intend to implement the workings of a UI with further plans to create a website and an app for IOS and android.

Built With

• java