Project Details

The Challenge | From Curious Minds Come Helping Hands

Your challenge is to design and build an innovative platform to integrate satellite data and information about vulnerable populations and environmental hazards in order to identify the most at-risk populations. Be creative and think outside the box. How will you identify those people that are often missed, but need aid the most?

Catch These Helping Hands

Catch These Helping Hands is a website with the mission of identifying the most vulnerable populations that are ill equipped to recover from natural disasters based on the Human Development Index.

We were inspired to take on this challenge because two of our three members immigrated from Cameroon; a country that is ill equipped to recover from natural disasters. Our website identifies the most vulnerable populations based on their socioeconomic status and past occurrences of need based aid. This determines which populations would be in the most need of aid and which are usually overlooked. Our team had a prior commitment the first day of competition so we began our project hours late which limited our product. We were unable to get our an API to work so so after multiple hours of trial and error we transferred from app development to website development. We finally got the prototype of our website to work completely for one country. Another issue that we had was as we were editing our video, the video decided to turn green every time we tried to input it into the editor causing us to be unable to edit our video, and our editing software was very slow when exporting our final video after we got it to work. We had help from many many mentors. They ranged from a developer helping us request apis to an economist helping us identify the socioeconomic status levels. To improve our project, we plan to finish all the populations' data sets. The website developer we utilized was Weebly and the software used to create the video was Windows Screen Recorder, Sony Videos Pro 13, and HD Audio Recorder. The hardware we used included three Lenovo computers and one LG. The NASA resource we utilized is NASA's Earth Data. This website shows the status of a natural disaster which, coupled with our websites information, assists us in determining if a population needs aid in real time.