Our Inspiration At the start of this event, we were introduced to the world's oceans: the world's oceans and the problems that it was facing. The theme was vast, and similarly, so were its problems. The issues ranged from over-fishing to seabed damage, and from micro-plastics to the rise and spread of dead zones in the Earth's bodies of water. Faced with such daunting challenges, we decided to target dead zones specifically, which we felt was one of the most threatening and alarming side effects of human impact upon the Earth. We felt that the rise and spread of dead zones, or the literal "wastelandification" of an entire section of a body of water, needed to be stopped, or at the very least, its effects reduced.
What Our Solution Does To implement our solution to the issue that we chose, we decided to create a website. This website was built with the intent to fulfill two key purposes. One, it would be an invaluable resource in informing both the professional and the amateur of the conditions of the world's oceans, in specific regards to the world's dead zones. For this, we created a website with a global map, of which all of the current world dead zones are displayed and identified. One can also see that if they were to hover over a specific dead zone of interest, an entire array of information pertaining to that dead zone is displayed (i.e., Size, oxygen concentration, etc.). Two, the website would be an invaluable resource in empowering both the professional and the amateur to contribute to the website and/or develop their own solutions to the problems that the oceans are facing.
How We Built Our Solution To set up a website, there are two components: the server that the website runs on and the HTML that the website is made up of. We set up a local server through Django, which is a framework for developing websites. We accessed a virtual environment through the command prompt, and with Diango commands, we were able to run the server. Also, we used python to link the HTML files to the local server. We wrote the HTML using the Windows Notepad text editor. Through HTML tags, we were able to set up the website and allow user interactions.
Challenges We Faced Along the Way Throughout this project we faced countless issues and delays. However, once we held a picture in our minds of the final product, we decided we would persist until the idea came to fruition. First, we had to learn the fundamentals of website-building. Second, we needed to utilize the languages and frameworks we would need to implement our idea. This, perhaps, was our most major challenge, as we began the day with zero knowledge of the website-building language of HTML. Despite this, however, we persisted in learning and applying our knowledge until we were able to successfully host our website locally. Following this, we attempted to utilize Domain.com to host our website, as that is what we were given to use as our website host. Unfortunately, for us and many other groups, the Domain.com proved to be an unsuccessful host since we received unexpected errors in signing up our domains. In light of this, we decided to continue utilizing the local host and improving our website.
Accomplishments We're Proud Of By far, the main accomplishment we are proud of is that we came in with zero knowledge of a subject and left with a finished product developed with said subject. Despite the many frustrations and moments in which we thought we could not progress further, we persisted and succeeded in bringing our concept to a reality.
What's Next for Our Solution In the future, we envision that such a website can become the invaluable resource it could be for both professionals and the general public. For the professionals, we hope their academia could continue to grow the website's data, and increase its accuracy, precision, and relevancy. We also hope that the efforts of their colleagues could give them enlightenment in their own research and empower them to develop the solutions to the daunting challenges facing the world's oceans today. For the general public, we hope that even the most amateur layperson could gain a comprehensive and factual understanding of the condition of the world's oceans, and perhaps even develop their own solutions as well. In summary, we hope that with the combined efforts of the world, our vision of a collaborative, cooperative, and largely informational website can contribute to the creation of a healthier, livelier, and better world.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.