Green Initiative

our homepage!
join events!
create event!
log in!
create account!

Inspiration

Two out of the three team members live in New York City. New York City is known for its towering skyscrapers, famous neighborhoods, and its diversity. It is also known for being plagued by trash and rats everywhere. Neglecting to properly maintain neighborhoods can lead to litter, waste buildup, and an overgrowth of harmful invasive species. These conditions can create breeding grounds for pests, reduce air and water quality, and contribute to soil degradation. Clean parks, beaches, and neighborhoods in general also provide a healthier and more attractive environment for both wildlife and humans to enjoy. Our own neighborhoods fall victim to the trash problem, so we wanted to create a website that would help us deal with the issue.

What it does

Green Initiative is an event planner for people interested in cleaning up their local beaches, parks, and neighborhoods. People interested in local clean up events and people hosting these events must create an account before signing up for an event or creating an event. Hosts must enter their address, an event description, their phone number, names of current party members, and their own name.

How we built it

We tried using three different methods in order to design the layout of our website. At first, we started off with a google jamboard. One of our team members mentioned Figma and had some experience with it, so we tried using that too. We planned out exactly how many web pages there would be. We talked about how we wanted our web pages to look like, but because we weren’t able to communicate well verbally and because not all of us were experienced with Figma, we had to move onto actual pencil and paper. In addition, we showed each other websites that we liked the look of. We split up our work and then built the actual project on Replit.

Challenges we ran into

We wanted to create a website. But there was just one problem: none of us really had any web development experience. Although two of us in the group had played around with HTML and CSS before, we did not feel confident at all in creating a whole website. One major problem we had while developing the website was figuring out how logging in and in general updating the website would work. We thought of using an array to store all the information taken in by the form, but the website would lose track of that information as soon as we moved onto another web page. After thorough searching, we found out that JavaScript had something called a local storage that would allow us to save data in the browser. In addition, one of our initial teammates was unable to participate. We had to scramble to allocate her tasks equally.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of making our website look aesthetic and be functional while not having experience in any of the languages we used to create the project. We are also proud to complete our submission to our first hackathon!

What we learned

We learned about what it means to work as a newly formed team under a very short time period. As beginners, we had to learn how to plan a project from start to finish and allocate tasks as needed. We spent a lot of time reading information and watching videos about how to style our website and we are all more acquainted with CSS, Javascript and HTML as a result. We also learned that serious projects take time to complete because you have to make constant adjustments to your program.

What's next for Green Initiative

Green Initiative could possibly host a service in the future. In addition to providing a list of possible events to volunteer at, Green Initiative could offer cleaning supplies such as garbage bags for a small fee. The kiosks would be in person at various parks in New York City (as we are mostly based in NYC). In an effort to get more people involved in various events, we could also provide an email and text service that notifies people when there are new community events available.

Built With

Submitted to

Black Wings Hacks 2023
- Winner Second Place

Created by

I did mainly the HTML and CSS parts on the projects. My main focus was developing the Join Events page and making sure that the buttons and text boxes were edited for each page. I also helped with editing the About Us page and developing the details for all of the possible events. I had worked with HTML and CSS for a short period before but it was a simple project and did not require this much focus. I am happy I gained more experience in both these languages.

Jessica Gentles
I helped develop the focus of our project in relation to the theme and drafted out potential layouts for where the logo, navigation bar, and content will go. I mainly worked with css to design the webpage and took time to figure out what color themes, borders, and font sizes would work best. I did use a bit of html to construct the layout and content of the 'about us' page. I was also very new to front end development, and am very proud of the outcome my teammates and I created despite our initial limited knowledge.

Ariel Diaz
I did a bit of everything. I worked on setting up the navigation bar (and styled it using CSS), as well as the skeleton HTML files for all the web pages. I also worked on all the JavaScript in order to save the users information to the website after account creation. I'm completely new to web development, so all the syntax and parts of the program confused me at first. They still kind of do, but I'm glad to gain some experience in these languages!

Maliha Tasnim