Our project is composed of two main parts - both of which are focused on voting systems and processes. The first part of this explorable explanation project is centered on explaining how the Electoral College works during the process of electing a new president of the United States. The second section provides another learning space whereupon we will discuss alternative voting systems that are used around the world. These voting systems also play a role in the Electoral College process. These two explanations will ultimately inform the user about how U.S. presidential elections work and increase the user’s knowledge of voting systems. We hope to shed light on these complex processes, given their profound impacts on both the individual and society as a whole.
Since the explorable explanation is built in the browser, it is built with the basic web essentials: HTML5/CSS3 and JavaScript. The majority of the code is mostly D3.js (abbreviated here on out as D3) integrated with AngularJS. D3 is what makes the explorable explanation possible as it allows us to build powerful visualizations in the browser. AngularJS is a great framework to use for this project as it allows for data-binding and in turn, allows us to update graphs easier. We also utilized AngularJS to facilitate the scrolling events for our page.
When building our charts, we followed the reusable chart framework as taught by our instructor, Mike Freeman. This way, we wrote good software and also encouraged others to use our charts (MapChart and PebbleChart).
Group project done by Vincent Wu, Jackson Brown, Richard Ding & Brian Luu