Samiksha, Soumya, and Marleny (team Orangutan Synergy) made Pivot from Palm and submitted it to Sego Lily Hacks! Pivot from Palm is a website that encourages site visitors to think about the impacts the palm oil industry has on the environment and endangered animals, such as orangutans. Our website has multiple features for our visitors to interact with and gain valuable information about palm oil from. Users can take our interactive quiz to test their knowledge and, based on their results, can choose to visit our site’s different pages. These pages are filled with interesting resources, such as helpful Youtube videos, an engaging Padlet, and tips regarding the next steps and the use of sustainable palm oil!

Once we decided that we’d like to do something related to the environment, one of our team members who has taken AP Environmental Science proposed the idea about palm oil and its effects on the environment and orangutans. We thought the idea was unique and would set us apart from other teams. We wished to make a hack that positively impacts the environment and makes a good change, and this topic deserved more awareness as it is not widely spoken about. Additionally, two out of three people on our team had no idea that this was an issue, and they were interested in learning and researching more about palm oil. We hope that with our hack, “Pivot from Palm”, we were able to shed light on and raise more awareness of palm oil collection’s negative impacts on the environment.

A challenge we faced as a team was that most of us were beginner coders. We initially had 4 team members, but 2 dropped out, and we had to begin to search for teammates. Additionally, the time limit and bugs in our JavaScript code were challenges as we had to keep trying different methods to fix our code. We were set back with debugging errors for our interactive quiz and weren’t able to get it working; however, as a team, we overcame this adversity by focusing on and showcasing other aspects of our website.

As a team, we are proud of how much we accomplished in such little time. The obstacles and challenges we faced helped us grow as individuals and coders.

We’re just getting started! In the near future, we hope to add an educational game to our website highlighting and teaching about Palm oil, fixing our JavaScript and making sure there’s more functionality to the quiz, and adding a blog feature.

Replit (IDE) HTML CSS JavaScript Canva (Logo) Figma (Prototype)