For our first hackathon, we decided to create an educational website to teach users about the zones of the ocean and some of the aquatic life that inhabits those zones.
Ocean Adventure provides the user a unique, interactive experience to explore and navigate the three zones of the ocean, as well as certain species of sea creatures that live there. By scrolling down, users can navigate through the deep sea at their own pace and learn about the Surface Zone, Twilight Zone, and the Deep Ocean. Users are also placed in a first-person point of view as they can use their pointer as a flashlight to make the bubbles expand and become more apparent.
We built the website using React for the front end and collaborated over Github.
Since this was our first hackathon for the four of us, we had to learn how to effectively use Github and Git to collaborate together on Ocean Adventure. Despite having only one team member with some prior web development experience, our team was able to self teach ourselves and overcome this obstacle. We also ran into challenges about how to make the website visually appealing, easy to use, and informative at the same time so we went for a clean and simple user interface.
Our group is most proud of successfully creating our website as well as the experience we have gained from collaborating as a group through Github. We truly have learned so much about designing a web page in the span of 36 hours. We are also proud of the way we managed to add a lot of information without making the user interface too cluttered, crafting a minimalistic ocean adventure for our users.
We came in with little knowledge about web development and Git, but over the course of the Hackathon, we learned a lot about React and how to collaborate over Github in general.
In the future, we can add more animations, sea creatures, and locations around the world to explore the mysteries of the true final frontier - Earth's oceans!