Stranger Endanger

The goal of “Stranger Endanger” is to raise awareness around endangered species by humanizing them. It is a social media platform for zookeepers to share the personalities of the specific endangered animals that they take care of. Users can hop on the website and meet real endangered animals that are being cared for in zoos. Every animal introduces their name, characteristics, stories, and even chat with users. This humanization of each animal allows users to bond and relate with them. This project was inspired by pandas - specifically Chi-Chi and An-An. Pandas are the mascot of animal conservation and they represent a remarkable story of how an endangered species can be saved from extinction with popularity. Chi-Chi and An-An are a pair of pandas who traveled miles and miles with the intention of mating, but they ended up hating each other. Their comical story resonated with many people, which kickstarted the global panda conservation action. Even though pandas represent a success story for conservation, there **still exists 1 million species at the risk of extinction**. Thus, we created “Stranger Endanger” to connect users to these animals, and hopefully lead to awareness and more funding towards their conservation efforts.

We started with an idea inspired by pandas, and jumped into a Figma Prototype for the website. Then, Grace started off with the basic HTML structure while Jaeyoung brought the homepage parallax animation to life. San worked on the backend, and prepared all the data/image transfer (between the frontend and backend). We each started working on the different components; Grace worked on the ChatGPT API, San built the database, Jaeyoung made the animation and styling, and Emily worked on the homepage image. We were able to work efficiently by discussing collaboratively, assigning roles, then asking for help when needed.

The first problem that we ran into was brainstorming. We started off hastily, without fully planning out our idea and the functionality. By rushing to save time, it backfired on us since we ended up switching our idea into something we were more passionate about, 4 hours in. We learned the importance of pre-planning, design, and communication. This was our first in-person, overnight hackathon, which led to a lot of sleeplessness, sometimes resulting in typos. These typos often led to a long session of debugging. We could have managed our time more efficiently by setting specific time goals for each person and being cautious about using open softwares.

Overall, it was a spectacular learning experience for us, and we are looking forward to continue working on our website. In the near future, we would like to deploy our website, add a following and likes function (similar to Instagram), add an updates page (similar to Twitter), and add a map. Our ultimate goal would be to have this app used around the world to interact with endangered animals and make an impact through monetary donations. We could do this through adding an algorithm to better match a user to animals they may like.

Thank you!