Inspiration
We started by brainstorming what cross-cultural understanding meant. To us, culture is commonly transmitted through food, music, and language. We decided to incorporate these concepts into a travel website called Explori that gives you a taste of a region of the world so that you can make the most of your travel experience.
What it does
Explori teaches you about popular food and music in the region you're traveling to, as well as showing you common currencies and translating helpful phrases into the most common language for each region.
How we built it
Our team doesn't have any prior experience with web development, so we built the back-end of Explori and then used Figma to design a prototype of the website. The back-end team built out the Food, Banking, and Music sections by reading data from a CSV file, and the Further Reading section was made using the Wikipedia API.
Challenges we ran into
The Google Translate API wouldn't return a valid response, so we ended up focusing on using the Wikipedia API instead. It seems to be a fairly common issue, so in future versions we plan to try a different translation API instead. For the front-end, there were issues with the auto-layout conflicting with some of the variants, so we had to redo the components.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Our back-end coders had never used an API before, so getting the Wikipedia API integrated was a huge success! On the front-end, our coders got familiar with Figma's auto-layout and made interactive components, such as a heart button and a drop-down menu.
What we learned
We built lots of new skills through Explori, including making calls to an API and using Figma tools like auto-layout, components, and variants to make our project more efficient. We also learned how to communicate between the back-end and front-end teams and make sure that changes were implemented on both sides when we ran into challenges.
What's next for Explori
There's a lot of diversity within each region we selected, so the next step is adding more specificity. Ideally, Explori would be able to differentiate by country and then by major cities.
There could also be more info on each category: music, banking, and food. For example, for music and food, there could be a social aspect where people could give thoughts or reflect on their personal experiences. There could also be more details such as recipes, currency exchange rate, and top music artists of each region.
We'd also like users to be able to make profiles and save trips as collections with dishes and phrases that they want to try out!
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