Space Apps Challenge 2018

Below is a list of team members of Ph^D.

Madeline Vagnuolo - Lead coder, 10th grade

Halli Morrison - Coder, designer, content contributor, 10th grade

Katie Runyans - Coder, artist, website designer, 10th grade

Karis Morrison - Editor, chief audio and visuals, 8th grade

Allie Polzin - Main website designer, 8th grade

Ella Duus - website designer, content researcher, writer, narrator, presenter, 8th grade

Our team selected the challenge "Don't Forget the Can Opener!" Our mission was to "create an easy-to-use way for people to develop their own, custom checklists – both items and plans – for specific kinds of disasters. Use NASA images, videos, or data visualizations to illustrate each disaster type, to help people understand how to prepare." Read more about our process and why we chose this challenge below.

Our solution to this problem is a website where the main features are a personalized checklist for both supplies and instructions, text alerts when you are at risk for a natural disaster, and information straight from NASA. Our project is a website/app because almost anyone can use them nowadays. It is the easiest, quickest solution, especially because our challenge solution could be used in an emergency. Users can also use the offline version if a natural disaster has left them without internet connection.

We were very excited for this opportunity that was shown to us by our Girl Scout troop leader, Jennifer Johnson, which is where our journey started. This was a great opportunity for us to accomplish two of our Girl Scout troop’s goals: to explore STEM in a hands-on, supportive environment and to make the world a better place. This inspired our choice of “Don’t Forget the Can Opener!” During the initial challenge weekend, we developed our project basis and idea: an easy-to-use, multi-purpose disaster preparedness tool.

We faced multiple challenges, such as conflicting ideas, sleep deprivation, and a few coding frustrations, but overall, our strong teamwork and practical skills helped us overcome those obstacles.

This week, we have focused on streamlining our product and creating our thirty-second video. We have made tremendous progress on our website, such as discarding our mock-up and creating an accessible website using Python and HTML. For our video, we focused on highlighting our Girl Scout values and some of the website’s best features.

Our team was very satisfied with our end product, and it met our goal for a functional, easy-to-use solution to this challenge. We faced many obstacles, but we persevered, and it paid off. We were all happy with the high quality of teamwork and camaraderie that our team had. As the Girl Scout Law states,

“I will do my best to be

honest and fair,

friendly and helpful,

considerate and caring,

courageous and strong, and

responsible for what I say and do,

And to respect myself and others,

respect authority,

use resources wisely,

make the world a better place, and

be a sister to every Girl Scout.”

Here are links to our earlier project parts:

Weebly Mock-up: https://disaster-prep.weebly.com/

Python code: https://github.com/madelinev/Disaster-prep/blob/ma...

Unfished website code: https://github.com/madelinev/Unfinished-Disaster_p...