Inspiration
One of our team members had participated in a beach cleanup event in the past and enjoyed the experience because he saw the positive impact it had on the environment. We want to expand these kinds of opportunities to more people around the country through our website by being a hub for beach cleanup event information. We also want our website to be community-oriented by allowing individuals to join others in their community to work towards a sustainable cause.
What it does
Our website consolidates beach cleanups happening across the US, to which individuals can sign up for through our website. All they need to do is click “Join a Cleanup” and choose from the filters to specify what location and dates they are available. A list of cleanups that satisfy the user’s selections will then be displayed. Individuals can also register to organize their own cleanup through our website. They can navigate to the “Host a cleanup” page and fill in all the required fields, including their contact information, date and time of the event, and location of the cleanup. Another feature our website has is a leaderboard, where the individuals with the highest amount of logged hours spent at cleanup events are recognized.
How we built it
To build our website, we used the VS Code editor, where we used HTML and CSS for the display elements and JavaScript to store form information that we incorporated in our website.
Challenges we ran into
We faced some challenges throughout the project, the main one being learning how to use HTML/CSS and JavaScript as we all had very little exposure to it. Therefore, we spent most of our time researching how to use the syntax of HTML and CSS to display what we wanted. Another issue we ran into was creating the actual searching algorithm because we couldn’t figure out how to implement a database with the HTML program we had in the set time constraint.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Although we ran into many difficulties, we are all proud of being able to learn so much in such a short span of time through our own curiosity. Our team was made up entirely of freshman, and we have very little experience with building projects like this from scratch, but we were determined to simply learn from this hackathon and create a helpful product. We ran into roadblocks along the way due to our limited knowledge, but we were patient with them and thoughtfully planned how we would solve each one. We believe our project has the potential to help better marine environments and stimulate more climate action among individuals, and we look forward to adding more features in the future as we learn more skills.
What we learned
Throughout the creation of this project, we learned the importance of having a strong team dynamic, especially as we were all working on different parts of the website to make sure they were able to integrate fully at the end. We also became more proficient with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as there were many formatting rules and functions to learn and get acquainted with.
What's next for Clean Society
There are several improvements we can foresee incorporating into our website in the future. One of the most important being adding more filters to the beach cleanup finder. Currently, our only filter is state location because it took our team a long time to figure out how to program it. But we’d like to increase the specificity of our search results to the user with more filters like city location and dates and times available. We also would have liked to add an educational page on marine pollution, so users who visit our website can learn more about our mission and the impact that these small-scale cleanups can have on marine ecosystems. Lastly, we hope to implement a database into our website, so we can store more information about cleanup events across the country, and increase user reception and engagement in this environmental movement.
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