Inspiration
Bethaney and I love plants. Owning several ourselves, we often run into the problem of identifying plants. Some plants are known by multiple names or they're just hard to describe. Without a name or even a genus (a higher plant classification) it's hard to tell what the plant needs. Without proper sunlight, humidity, or watering schedules, plants will die.
What it does
Know Your Roots lets users submit information about their plant so our database can help identify their plant. We made our questions easy enough for new time plant owners to answer because not everyone is a plant expert. We also have a gallery where our users can browse through beautiful images of plants and immediately find information about how to care for it
How we built it
We worked together to build a database of 25 common house plants, sorted by leaf shape, leaf shading, and flowers, amongst other things.
Challenges we ran into
While I worked on the HTML, Bethaney worked in Python to create the question logic that will allow us to present the right plant to the user. All was well until we realized that neither one of us know how to connect HTML and Python. We spent hours on trying to solve that problem. We looked up methods, asked for help, and even looked into Javascript, Ruby, and R as alternative languages to use. Thus our second problem.
I'm familiar with Ruby and know that ruby can be embedded into HTML. It was our answer. Sadly, my laptop did not recognize Ruby. I asked for help from the volunteers and even they didn't understand why Ruby wasn't working. In the end, I tried to teach myself as much Javascript as I could and began to focus on the design and visuals of our site.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Bethany is a first-time coder and I only got back into programming a few days ago. We were rusty and unprepared in our own ways but we come here to code and have fun. This was the first hackathon for the both of us. Bethany learned a lot more about Python and I tried to teach myself Javascript in 9 minutes. This is definitely something I want to do again.
What we learned
We learned that we have to make databases public to use them on a website, that indents and formatting are really important, especially in Python, and that sometimes you have to just try something and if it goes wrong we have to learn from it and try something else.
What's next for Know Your Roots
Next, we will continue to develop our programming skills so we can create a clean and efficient way to provide the information out users need. Once that is complete we will expand our database to include more plants and the option for users to suggest plants they want to see. We want Know Your Roots to grow.
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