An interactive space-themed website created for students to practice mindfulness by Natalie Sarabosing, Janavi Gupta and Avantika Gupta @ Carnegie Mellon University. Check out the website here: [https://guptajanavi.github.io/cosmos-cares]
The inspiration for Cosmos Cares came from a desire to create a platform that promotes mindfulness and well-being among students, particularly by using a space-themed approach to make it engaging and calming. We wanted to provide a resource that not only helps students manage anxiety but also fosters a sense of wonder and curiosity about the cosmos.
The main page of our website is minimalistic and designed to allow you to explore features without being overwhelmed with information. Each star is hyperlinked to a different web page that offers you the opportunity to practice mindfulness in different ways such as:
- Mindfulness Journal: Users can maintain a personal mindfulness journal where they can record their thoughts, feelings, and experiences, which they can then 'send to the moon'
- Trivia: The website provides interesting and educational space-related facts to stimulate curiosity and learning.
- Meditation: Cosmos Cares offers links to mediation, stretches, calming lo-fi music, etc.
- Affirmations: Users can access a collection of positive affirmations to boost their self-esteem!
The website uses a combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We used CSS to format graphics and texts and Javascript to embed other links and provide more dynamic functionality on the website. All of this was then embedded into HTML files and deployed using Github Pages.
The primary challenge we ran into was that none of us had any experience with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Github or Github Pages! We struggled with not knowing whether our ideas were easily implementable in these languages even before we started coding. We also had a steep learning curve while implementing these ideas because we had to self-learn quickly to create a tangible website. The short timespan of a hackathon added to these challenges.
We're proud of having built a fully functional website which is very close in design and functionality to what we envisioned. Mindfulness and well-being are important to us and it is super cool that we were able to collaborate on something tangible with a very limited skill set so quickly. We gained a lot of new technical skills, in web development (HTML/CSS), Git, backend development (JavaScript) and learning how to write clean, easy-to-understand code. We also gained project management skills and learned how to communicate effectively and efficiently.
We hope to enhance the existing features of our website such as creating a database to store users' journal entries, adding randomised affirmations, and making the website more dynamic and interactive with better animations and design features. We also hope to be able to better integrate it into screens of all sizes. We would also like to add other methods of practicing mindfulness such as pomodoro timers and daily wellness reminders.