Phloem

New Skills. Your Learning Style. Your Dream Career.

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Inspiration

Mallika’s passion about the economy and automation-induced job loss served as the foundation for our team to build upon. Brian’s work in Autism self-advocacy inspired the consideration for neurodiversity, and their Animal Rights work helped bring in the Green New Deal framework. Zaina’s belief that a company’s moral standpoints and the organizations they support must also be ethically good lead our team to make sure the database only included morally good businesses. Isha’s interest in minimizing COVID related impacts on our economy and finding better alternatives helped inform the user experience of the website.

What it Does

Phloem is Phloem is a job searching tool that caters towards the user’s unique learning ability. After the user inputs their skills and dream job, we will find the skills that are missing and provide them with educational resources that will help fill in the gap. We especially hope to help those who may have lost their careers to automation or the COVID pandemic, including industries such as the food industry, transportation, manufacturing and hospitality. We are also committed to supporting good in the world. That's why all the companies and job opportunities in our database are environmentally sustainable and have no ties to any form of oppressive government , racism, sexism, religious intolerance, and homophobia.

How we built it/What we accomplished

In order to create Phloem, we used Python for the back end component and HTML/CSS for the front end component; we connected both aspects using Fast API. We called values from a database and created objects for each person. The program will look at the skills the user has, the skills the job requires and provide resources for any missing skills based on the user’s learning style. The website showcases our team’s vision and contact information. When the user enters their user id, their profile will come up. When the user searches for a job, the job information will be shown.

Challenges:

The most difficult part about this project, and possibly one of the most rewarding, was connecting the back end to the front end using API. While we were able to successfully connect the SQL database to display on the website using FAST API, we ran into problems while connecting front-end to back-end, so had to keep that last part separate. After the hackathon ends we’ll work on finishing that up!

What we learned

This was the first hackathon for most of us, and each member learned a lot of new skills in the process. While Zaina knew some basic HTML and CSS previously, she expanded her knowledge and learned some more advanced features of HTML and CSS for the website. Isha learned how to use FastAPI, how to build a database, how to use SQL to filter through the data, and how to connect backend (FastAPI) to frontend (HTML and CSS). Mallika had never used html before, and gained experience using it for our website while helping Zaina and Isha. She also learned how to switch between SQL database tables (another new technology for the team) and python while doing the back end for sending users tailored recommendations. She also learned about Fast API while connecting back-end to front-end Brian, who studies math and biology and has minimal experience in CS, gained a lot from watching the rest of the team code and was inspired to get more serious about coding, and learned to create graphics and organize a presentation.

What’s next

In order to expand Phloem, we want to upload more jobs and courses to our database. We also want to connect the back end and front end for the Courses Search and database to display courses according to different learning styles. We’d also like to add a function in which a user searches a company and we provide alternative morally good businesses to work with.

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