Chat Bot Tel

Inspiration

I wanted to create an environmental-related hack because it's an important thing to be aware of. I see so many people using plastic water bottles and other disposable single-use plastic, just because it's convenient, and I wanted to bring attention to the actual impacts of that on our environment. I created a chat bot because this is my first hackathon and I wanted to code something that I know how to do but I've never done before.

What it does

This chat bot tells you the effects of plastic water bottles on ocean pollution and marine life. It takes user input and forms a response based on the input. It also provides information about alternative ways of living that produce less single-use plastic trash.

How I built it

I used Rutger's Standard In and Standard Out libraries, which I learned how to use in CS 111, which I took last semester. I also took information from earthday.org and theoceancleanup.com.

Challenges I ran into

I originally was going to submit something with my team on Saturday, but that ended up not working out. When I woke up on Sunday, I still really wanted to submit something for my first hackathon! I had the idea to do a simply chatbot. Something challenging was the time limit: I only had about 2 hours to plan, code, and demo this program!

What I learned

On Saturday, I learned a lot about API and full stack dev. I hope that I can apply these things at my next hackathon. I also learned how to create a public repository on Github so that I could share my project.

What's next for Chat Bot Tel

If I had more time, I would definitely create a frontend website so that this chat bot is accessible to many people, not just whoever is using the command line. I would also add sources for where chatbot Tel is getting its information. I would also want to create loops to handle when user input does not match the expected input. If I had this idea earlier, I would've made this program more interactive and I would do more research about ocean pollution so that I could add that to my program.

Built With

• java
• std.in
• std.out
• vscode