Space Llamas| Sustaining Our Planet for Future Generations
Awards & Nominations
Space Llamas has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
Sustaining Our Planet for Future Generations
Promoting Environmental Responsibility and Awareness
Summary
We created an interactive, engaging website that informs readers about a myriad of environmental issues. It includes their causes, effects, as well as how they are interconnected. Our website emphasizes the negative impacts of environmental neglect on our lives. In addition, it provides ways that the reader can help combat these impacts, including tips and lifestyle changes. This information is displayed alongside an abundance of supplementary NASA data in the form of graphs, maps, satellite images, and fun facts.
How We Addressed This Challenge
It’s important that people of all ages to understand the environmental issues affecting our planet in order for positive changes to be implemented. Thus, we developed a website that introduces people to a variety of those issues, as well as ways they can minimize the impacts of these issues. Healing the wounds that humankind has inflicted on the planet is a collaborative effort. It cannot be done by a few people alone. With information about the issues organized in one place, readers can see connections on both a small and large scale.
This website is very intuitive, so anyone can easily navigate and understand it. Our homepage contains our introduction and overview of climate change, ways to help, and APA citations. The center displays our Earth and links to a diverse range of environmental issues. Every environmental issue has an information page containing more in-depth information, like causes, effects, and (not so) fun facts. As said in the previous section, each also includes NASA data in a wealth of different and engaging forms (as graphs, maps, satellite images, and fun facts). Furthermore, the pages contain links to other relevant environmental issues, demonstrating the correlation between them.
Our primary aim is to inform people about these problems, as well as steps that can take to solve them. We hope that by making this information as accessible as possible, more awareness will be spread and more action will be taken towards sustaining our planet for future generations.
How We Developed This Project
This is our team’s first hackathon, and since we are all socially distanced, we wanted to choose a project that we could all work on virtually. Sustaining Our Planet for Future Generations seemed like a good choice, as it fit all the above criteria and was a topic that we all found interesting. Not only that, but we also felt the responsibility, as citizens of the Earth, to make a meaningful, useful contribution to the ongoing efforts of sustaining our planet. Our project could reach many others through this hackathon, which would open up the avenue for more positive changes taking place. While planning this project, we brainstormed a variety of different ideas, and a website seemed like the most realistic and relevant format for our project.
We specifically chose to focus on the topics of rising CO2 levels, ocean acidification, the depleting ozone layer, melting ice caps/retreating glaciers, reduced habitat, more natural disasters, and rising ocean levels because of how interconnected these issues were with each other. They demonstrate how one environmental issue can be linked with another, and how cause and effect can lead to bigger, more dire consequences. For example, rising CO2 levels make the atmosphere warmer, which contributes to the melting ice caps. The resulting rising ocean surface temperatures increase the severity of hurricanes. If we do not take the steps to mitigate these issues right now, they will eventually butterfly disastrously, causing irreversible damage.
We developed the website using HTML and CSS. Some of our team members have experience with HTML and CSS, but none of us have used it recently, so we had to relearn many aspects along the way. We all finished the project with more knowledge and experience in coding and collaboration than when we entered, making this a valuable experience for all of us.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
We can attribute much of our information and graphics to NASA. We used satellite images, graphs, and studies from NASA to make our site more visually and intellectually interesting. A reader can choose to dive deeply or shallowly on certain topics, depending on their interests.
Much of our information and data displays can be credited to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory under NASA Global Climate Change. For example, we used graphs from the laboratory to showcase rising CO2 and ocean levels. We also used a combination of their graphs and satellite images for our section on melting ice caps and retreating glaciers, showcasing Antarctica’s decreasing mass over time as more and more ice is lost to global warming.
For our section on natural disasters, a study by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, as well as an image of a hurricane captured by NASA’s Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) was used. Additionally, we used satellite images from NASA Earth Observatory to demonstrate habitat loss. Furthermore, we used visual maps of data from NASA Ozone Watch on the area of the ozone hole to supplement the Depleting Ozone Layer environmental topic.
Our project was greatly influenced by this information, as it was instrumental to not only our data but also our website. The integration of the aforementioned graphics impacted the layout and presentation of our site, and therefore its appeal and effectiveness as well.
Project Demo
Project Demonstration:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVQEwmmCOCU&feature=youtu.be
(Note: this demo features a small portion of our website. To see it in its full glory, click on the link below!)
Here is the link to our finished site:https://Space-Llamas-Sustaining-Our-Planet-for-Future-Generations.katiemerrill.repl.co