Inspiration
When we were brainstorming ideas for our project, we talked about how we often heard our parents having conversations about the upcoming presidential election. We shared our frustrations about not being able to vote and impact the future of our nation. That’s when inspiration struck! We could impact the election by designing a program that could increase the number of informed voters!
What it does
Our program asks 10 top notch questions that are about current issues our politicians have varying views on. It uses answers to these responses and calculates how many times the user’s choice aligned with a certain candidate’s answer. This aspect of our code allowed it to be very user friendly and unique. We used 10 questions so that it doesn’t take too much of our user’s time and it is easy for an average person to take. After the tenth question our algorithm factors in the answer to each question to find which candidate best aligns with the user’s views. All information is private. Another aspect that makes our program unique is its potential to include state and local levels which have even less voter turnout and little to no publicity.
How we built it
Although the majority of our code was built on one person’s laptop, the other two people built certain aspects of the code individually such as the progress bar. This is how we divided and conquered, but also had to use a lot of teamwork. We worked well because we were all friends before and could have super fun throughout the whole weekend. Facebook messenger and facetime calls were common and helped us in collaborating and offering help/ideas to one another while looking at the code (via screen sharing on messenger). We used three different IDEs, all using JAVA so we could see which one the code worked the best in. We believe we wouldn’t be able to complete this program without our dedication, communication, perseveration, and teamwork.
Challenges we ran into
Our team faced many differing and exciting challenges. It ranged from specifics in our code and design such as our quotes and how to properly insert breaks for JButton fit on the page well to issues that are faced with other java programs we have done (syntax, lexical, runtime, and logic errors) We had some issues when creating so many global variables. Additionally, we had to deal with so much code for an ongoing issue that's plagued our country for centuries in such little time. Although the project was a little out of our comfort zone, we kept persevering to do the best of our abilities. Lastly, because of the current COVID-19 pandemic, we weren’t able to see one another in person. This meant that our communication skills had to be at its strongest in order to allow us to do our best job ss a team. All in all, it was a great coding experience and it really help each of us learn something new and improve our coding skills.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of everything we learned, we are proud of completing our project entirely by ourselves with having less than a year's coding experience, pushing ourselves to our limit, getting closer to our goals of becoming proficient in JAVA.
What we learned
We learned many technical programming skills such creating progress bars and using three different IDEs. We also learned how the application of computer science can be extremely useful in everyday life. However, the biggest things we learned were patience, perseverance, teamwork, and problem solving which we are sure will be beneficial to us in the future.
What's next for Settling on a Stance
Right now, our program is geared towards the candidates of the presidential election, but we would like to expand it to include state and local elections that have less publicity compared to the presidential election.
Sources for our project: Statistics: https://www.fairvote.org/primaries#open_and_closed_primaries Research and Quotes were found on these websites: https://2020election.procon.org/view.source-summary-chart.php https://joebiden.com/ https://www.donaldjtrump.com/ https://howiehawkins.us/ https://thehill.com/ https://www.nytimes.com/
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