Team Name: Beta
Project Title: Volunteen
Project Type: Website
Project Link: https://github.com/EmilyHuang111/volunteen-sumission
Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGJhVm8MRcA
Write Up:
We enjoy volunteering because it’s an opportunity for us to help others in something we’re passionate about. I’ve always loved teaching and Emily enjoys tennis, so for us, it isn’t about the hours we earn but the happiness it brings. However, within our own high school, many students treat volunteering as a chore they’re forced into because they don’t enjoy the tasks assigned. While there are numerous options available, it’s hard for teenagers to find ones that align with their passions and allow them to enjoy what they’re doing. Rather than spending hours scouring the internet, it’s simpler to half-heartedly go through an hour of tutoring because it’s the most accessible option, doing just enough to complete the required hours to graduate. In fact, the U.S. Census Bureau found that volunteering is down by seven percentage points, the lowest rate in nearly three decades. This shouldn’t be the case. Everyone deserves the opportunity to find joy in helping others. That’s why my partner and I decided to create Volunteen.
The original vision for Volunteen was to create a website that allowed organizations to advertise their opportunities to teenagers, giving teenagers a variety of options. But we decided to make it so much more. Now, we still have the intended features that allow organizations to post opportunities, enable students to filter through them to find ones nearby and related to subjects they enjoy, and allow them to sign up for these opportunities. However, after considering our target audience of teenagers and the organizations offering volunteer work for them, it became clear that we could make improvements. Teenagers live in a world of technology, so it made sense to add features like the chatbot to help register for activities and the fundraiser tool to help generate ideas. We also love the ability to share and compare our lives, which led to the creation of the community page, leaderboard, and badge system. Finally, we all enjoy a good challenge, so we included a challenge page, trivia, and a volunteer-themed Wordle. With these features, we hope teenagers will be happier and more motivated to volunteer, which, in turn, will help their communities. While this local impact by individuals may seem small, remember the quote by Julia Carney: “Little drops of water make the mighty ocean.”
While working on this project, my partner and I were both able to improve our individual abilities. Personally, this was my first time using JavaScript and CSS, and I had only tried HTML a few times before. With this project, I learned how to create functions in JavaScript, integrate attractive styling, and gain experience in developing features that process data. My partner was more advanced, yet she also pushed her limits by learning how to integrate different APIs into our code to make it more user-friendly. She learned how to create an AI-assisted chatbot, use Google APIs to help with location, and store information and images in a database, among other things.
This was not an easy task; one of the main challenges in our project was determining and ordering the nearest events. The system couldn’t interpret raw addresses, so we used a geocoding API to convert them into latitude and longitude coordinates. This allowed us to accurately locate and sort events by proximity. Other challenges included figuring out how to send notifications via email and creating an AI chatbot capable of signing up for and creating events for users. This was definitely the hardest part of the entire project, but it was worth it. It also led to the most rewarding part of the project: seeing the end product and knowing that we had created a powerful tool that could help communities, as well as gaining new skills for future projects, especially those involving AI.
Our team found AI to be an essential part of modern-day society, especially since our intended audience was teenagers. Therefore, we thought it was important to incorporate AI features into the project. In addition, we used AI to help generate ideas for what else our project could include to appeal to our audience, as we wanted to ensure we offered as many features as possible. We know not everyone would want all of them, so we also grouped our code in a way that makes it easy to remove features to match the needs of organizations that will use our website. In the near future, we plan to share our website with schools, charities, and more to help others.
