For my first project I’ve come up with a few ideas but I can’t decide which I want to do.
I first thought of doing a quiz. Something that I can make humorous and relate my personal experiences to. I thought of doing a “Which type festival goer are you?” I would pull from my own experiences of the typical kinds of people you see at every festival, as well as the plethora of lists out there like this one from Buzz Feed – 26 types of people you see at music festivals, or Vice’s version 11 types of assholes who attend music festivals. I would choose maybe 5 types of people and write funny descriptions for each and based on a list of questions you would be deemed one of the 5 at which point you would be given a picture of one of these people and the description I wrote.
Then I saw the internship opportunity you posted for EnviroMedia and was pretty interested in it. I was going to apply but thought I should wait until I have at least one project behind me in this class to show them. Then I started thinking of ways to make this project less trivial and do something that could actually have an impact even if it is a small one. The best idea I’ve come up with is a Water Calculator that estimates the amount of water you use each day.
The user will give the number of times they shower, bath, flush, wash dishes by hand, run dishwasher, run clothes washer, etc. and based on average usages it will calculate how much water the user uses each day. Then with the answer you will be given comparisons like you use x amount of water, this is enough water to do this with or enough water to fill a swimming pool. To put into perspective how much water we go through each day to make people think about that and maybe start to be more conservative and not waste water.
I thought that would be something that EnviroMedia would like to see being that it is pushing the green initiative and inspiring more sustainability in the world as opposed to something trivial like finding out which music festival goer you are.
When looking for inspiration for the water calculator I noticed there are already a lot of very complex water calculators ( much better than what I’m capable of programing) so I got a little discouraged. I’m not sure if I still want to do this idea but even a simple calculator would be better than the first idea in an employers eye ( I think).
Here is the link to my live water calculator : http://www.bengslade.com/watercalculator
I say live not finished, because I will continue to make changes to it to better present it, but it is fully functional with the working graph for now.