ElectriCity

Home Page
Simulation Banner
General Energy Information
Policy Information
Create Change Page
Simulation Instructions
Simulation Controls
Website Footer

Inspiration

We were inspired to create ElectriCity to teach students about the environmental challenges we face today so that they can go on to make this world a brighter, cleaner place. Climate change and clean energy are increasingly becoming points of concern and in order to sustain our resources and maintain a healthy environment, it is important that people are aware of how their decisions can affect the world around them.

What it does

ElectriCity is a website that houses information regarding different types of renewable and nonrenewable energy sources, as well as environmental policy. Additionally, it provides the user with additional resources and ways to reach out and help environmental organizations. Finally, it features a simulation game that allows the user to experiment with trying to find the cleanest way to power a city while at the same time keeping in mind a city budget.

How I built it

We created a website and a simulation using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and jquery. We first put in all the content using HTML and then created all the interactive parts of the game using javascript. Finally, we used CSS to improve the website and simulation’s aesthetic.

Challenges I ran into

While working on the game, we ran into a problem creating buttons to allow the user to add and remove pictures of certain energy sources to the city backgrounds. We tried adjusting and running the code many times but were unable to figure it out and reached out to a mentor to help. We went through the code piece by piece and eventually found the error, allowing us to successfully complete the program.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are proud of the amount of resources and all the information we are able to provide for students. We are also really proud of the game we created, a unique feature of our website is that we both have all of the information on a website as well as a simulation with the live usage of the information we were teaching.

What I learned

We learnt a lot about energy usage in the world. We also learned a lot about managing our time and working together to edit code.

What's next for ElectriCity

In the future, we want to be able to allow users to create accounts in order to gain a more personalized experience. We attempted to work with firebase to do this but were unable to finish this step. We would also like to be able to create a database with more information of energy costs, energy, and emissions in order to make the simulation as similar to real life as possible.