Team Name: The DeCoders
Project Title: Project GEM
URL of Project: https://replit.com/@Christie-Magloi/Changemaker#index.html
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfG3MqQcPTs
Write-Up: According to the United States Census Bureau, immigrants make up 54% of Miami’s total population and 21% of Florida’s total population. Living in Miami, where more than half of the city’s residents are immigrants, many of us have encountered, or even are, immigrants that have struggled with transitioning to the US and American culture. Based on our research, thousands of immigrants struggle to find the resources and community as they initially arrive in this country, and are in need of a helping hand that will guide them through the process of acclimating to living in the United States. This issue is especially meaningful for our team because not only do we live in a city where the majority of the population are immigrants, we are also adamant about retaining aspects of our (and our families’) cultures.
Our project is meant to be that guidance and resource for those who don’t know where to start. When immigrants can finally call this country home, they still struggle to find the opportunities that they came here for, and we are here to help. Our website provides resources for job opportunities, ESOL classes and lessons, advocacy groups,guidance, and other cultural assimilation programs that are already in place. There are also references to articles that will motivate immigrants to continue working towards the promise of prosperity in order to fulfill the “American Dream”.
Outside of people who have newly immigrated to the United States, our website can also serve as a resource for those who continue to seek out economic and social services, as well as an outlet for people to donate and give back to communities that are currently struggling with this issue. This website is ultimately for our parents, our neighbors, our friends, and all those who have gotten past the first obstacle of coming to the United States and emigrating from their countries, but are not sure what to do next.
To make it accessible and convenient for immigrants who come from non-English speaking countries, our website can be fully translated into over one hundred languages. These languages include Spanish and Haitian Creole, which are some of the most commonly spoken languages throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Therefore, our website aims to provide resources to every immigrant, no matter their native language, in a country where most resources and websites are only written in English.
While working on this project, there were many challenges and obstacles occurring. These challenges sometimes made it difficult to move on to the next step of designing our website. However, our team was able to push through, due to the motivation provided by this personal cause. We all came into this project with varying degrees of skill in coding, as well as various backgrounds in website development. Therefore one of the hardest parts to accomplish as a team was making sure that every team member was utilizing their full potential, and adapting to each other’s different coding styles. Additionally, researching and finding the resources proved to be more difficult than we imagined, especially when it came to prioritizing exactly what resources we thought that our website’s users would need the most. Since we wanted to ensure that the sources we were providing our users with were informational, reliable, and easy to understand due to some users not being familiar with navigating online. In the end we decided to incorporate resources that were concise and easy to understand.
While working on this project, our team’s most significant victory was figuring out how to incorporate several images into an image slideshow. Each team member found images that we wanted to include on the Home and Countries pages but we wanted to keep it organized and make sure that users did not feel overwhelmed by an excessive number of images. Therefore, we decided to add an image slideshow to include all the images we found and provide the user with various visual aids, all while keeping our website organized and concise. It was difficult to create the slideshow so that the images would move after a certain amount of time but our team was able to overcome this challenge by employing new HTML and CSS techniques that we learned. As a team, we are extremely grateful to have worked on this project, and hope to use it to impact those around us.
