Inspiration
What inspired our website was the fact that we're both very stressed and anxious about taking part in HackRU and the midterms we would have to take in the upcoming few days. We understand as college students we are supposed to manage and stay on top of things, but no one takes the time to express their feelings and thoughts about such things. We are also aware that there are students that are discouraged to share their feelings about such topics, and that isn’t healthy.
What it does
We believe that mental health issues are sometimes a last priority, but it is something that many individuals face, and we understand that attending such a big university can be intimidating and very lonely. What we present is a way to get students to open up and share their experiences with other students on campus, to create a closer and safer environment. We’ve created separate communities that allow students to learn about some of the mental health issues we go through, and connect and share with other students anonymously.
How we built it
We used HTML for all the text and images on the website, CSS for styling, and JavaScript to add some visual effects to the website. We also took time to research and learn about different mental health issues that are common among college students.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into challenges when trying to create visual effects using JavaScript. We do not have much experience using JavaScript, only some basic syntax, so writing code to have parts of the website move was a challenge. Also, we do not have experience in CSS so we ran into challenges trying to code the visual ideas we had in our heads. We are fairly new to coding and computer science in general, especially web development, so it was definitely very difficult to learn and understand our errors in 24 hours.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are extremely proud of what we were able to make in such short time given our experience with web development. As a first website, we are happy with what we were able to make. We feel as if because this is such a sensitive and overlooked subject, we are bringing awareness to mental health while bringing students together. We are also proud of learning how to create, style, and add some effects to a website since we never have done it before.
What we learned
We’ve learned a lot about the different mental health issues we students face on a daily basis, and different ways we can take steps to and suggest to cope with them. We have also learned how to code in HTML, how to style a website in CSS, and how to add some visual effects to our website using JavaScript. We hope to learn more about these languages as web development is a field that interests us.
What's next for RU Alone?
We hope to add a fully functional chat board to each of the different mental health sections. This way people can share their experiences with mental health anonymously. We would do this using HTML, CSS, Javascript, and some kind of database. Also more features, in general, to make the website more functional and user-friendly.
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