As a group of young female coders, we were excited to participate in a project in a traditionally male dominated field of computer science. We knew our interest was web development and we believe the mission to share knowledge about Internet to the wider public.
So, the All About Broadband Challenge was perfect for our team and we were excited to code a solution.
https://hacc2022.github.io/SouthShoreCoders/
This web site makes internet education on how the Internet works, how the Internet reaches Hawai'i and how to access the Internet. Each of these three sections have a dedicated page and a unique way to convey information.
This site uses HTML, JavaScript and CSS. Each one of us chose one of the sections mentioned above and had creative control over this page. We used the code editors Replit and VS Code. We used GitHub as our repository and GitHub Pages to host our demo. Our interactive map uses ArcGIS.
Originally the site was built using NextJS, however, the challenges outweighed the benefits for our specific use case. NextJS added significant complexity without bringing a lot of value and we were also all much more familiar with and comfortable with HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
We also ran into some challenges with our code editors. None of use were able to install a tool like VS Code as we did not own our own computers or have root access. Replit allowed us to code completely on the cloud, and it even gave us a terminal shell of sorts, however, we found the develop/debug cycle to be a bit slow.
We worked very hard to get the web page to work in both mobile and desktop views. This increases the accessibility significantly, which is exactly what our goal was. We also used "mobile first" which is a CSS technique to make sure the mobile view is the default and not an afterthought.
We knew we envisioned an interactive map as this was the best way to convey our information. Although it was very time intensive, we were able to create and embed a clickable and navigable map from ArcGIS.
We learned collaboration and team management skills while simultaneously expanding upon our web development experience. We learned about creating a successful project within a tight timeline. Each of our team members improved their skills in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. We also learned about the importance of accessibility and how to make a web page accessible to all users.
We hope to continue coding passion projects and hopefully competing in future hackathons. Many of us would also like to study computer science in higher education.