Hello, people! I’m really sorry for not writing more, but here is a blog post just to pique your curiosity/interest! Basically, in school, on Friday 7th period there is an activity called Genius Hour. What that is is you get to make your own project and work on it throughout the whole school year. It’s actually pretty hard to make an idea that

1. You like, and
2. You will be actually challenged while working on it (one of the requirements).

One day, while I was in the car with Mom, I was thinking about how I could combine geography and traveling with a project idea. Mom and I came up with a website called Villageography, which would be a geography and traveling website for my school, Village Elementary. It would collect the data from students and teachers about where they’ve been in their lives, and I would put it on an interactive map that would show the place name, and who has been there. I really liked that idea, and the next Friday, I went to school ready for Genius Hour.

At Genius Hour, 3 of my friends decided to join in on Villageography, so that was the official starting group: Vishnu, Jacob, Josh and I. We immediately got to work. Well… not immediately, and because we weren’t doing much and we had no real concrete plan of what we wanted/could do, both Jacob and Josh left. Vishnu stayed faithful, though.

After that, us 2 both got more to do (let’s just say all the work we were doing was 4. When there was four people, we each did 1. But, with 2 of us, we each got 2), but most of our Genius Hour periods were just randomly doing random stuff because we STILL didn’t know what we wanted to do.

One weekend, me and my dad basically did all the work and finished the beta interactive map that I was talking about 3 paragraphs ago. We coded it using HTML, CSS, and JS (programming languages that make up websites). It was a real surprise when I came on Monday and told Vishnu that the map was almost in working order. He freaked out. The weekend after that, me and Dad worked on the map even more, and it was like my dreams come true. Basically, we were starting to actually be productive. Then, I decided that we should make a fun thing on our website, and cloned my old Python program Trivia so that instead of miscellaneous trivia categories, I did categories that were related to maps and geography. So, our website was in full working order! It was exactly what we (or, at least I) wanted!

So, here’s a quick recap of the features of the map:

1. A home page
2. An interactive map, which is our main feature. It only accepts people who are in Village. There are dots, and when you hover your mouse above it, it will show you the name of the place AND the person/people who have been there. It is coded from HTML, CSS, and JS.
3. VillaGeoGames, which are exactly what their name indicates: Geography Games. It is coded from Python3.
4. About, Contact, and Collabs. About us, Contact us, and our only collaboration, which is with another Genius Hour group called Packstagram. It is a social media thing for our school (again, it’s called Village Elementary). Please go check it out at packstagram.weebly.com!

If you want to see the reason this blog post was made (Villageography), go to villageography.weebly.com!

Thanks for reading, and happy traveling/summer!