## Hack The Valley 4

Hack the Valley 2020 project

## On The Radar

**Inspiration**

Have you ever been walking through your campus and wondered what’s happening around you, but too unmotivated to search through Facebook, the school’s website and where ever else people post about social gatherings and just want to see what’s around?
Ever see an event online and think this looks like a lot of fun, just to realize that the event has already ended, or is on a different day?
Do you usually find yourself looking for nearby events in your neighborhood while you’re bored?
Looking for a better app that could give you notifications, and have all the events in one and accessible place?
These are some of the questions that inspired us to build “On the Radar” --- a user-friendly map navigation system that allows users to discover cool, real-time events that suit their interests and passion in the nearby area.

*Now you’ll be flying over the Radar!*

**Purpose**

On the Radar is a mobile application that allows users to match users with nearby events that suit their preferences.

The user’s location is detected using the “standard autocomplete search” that tracks your current location. Then, the app will display a customized set of events that are currently in progress in the user’s area which is catered to each user.

**Challenges**

* Lack of RAM in some computers, see Android Studio (This made some of our tests and emulations slow as it is a very resource-intensive program. We resolved this by having one of our team members run a massive virtual machine)
* Google Cloud (Implementing google maps integration and google app engine to host the rest API both proved more complicated than originally imagined.)
* Android Studio (As it was the first time for the majority of us using Android Studio and app development in general, it was quite the learning curve for all of us to help contribute to the app.)
* Domain.com (Linking our domain.com name, flyingovertheradar.space, to our github pages was a little bit more tricky than anticipated, needing a particular use of CNAME dns setup.)
* Radar.io (As it was our first time using Radar.io, and the first time implementing its sdk, it took a lot of trouble shooting to get it to work as desired.)
* Mongo DB (We decided to use Mongo DB Atlas to host our backend database needs, which took a while to get configured properly.)
* JSON objects/files (These proved to be the bain of our existence and took many hours to get them to convert into a usable format.)
* Rest API (Getting the rest API to respond correctly to our http requests was quite frustrating, we had to use many different http Java libraries before we found one that worked with our project.)
* Java/xml (As some of our members had no prior experience with both Java and xml, development proved even more difficult than originally anticipated.)
* Merge Conflicts (Ah, good old merge conflicts, a lot of fun trying to figure out what code you want to keep, delete or merge at 3am)
* Sleep deprivation (Over all our team of four got collectively 24 hours of sleep over this 36 hour hackathon.)

**Process of Building**

* For the front-end, we used Android Studio to develop the user interface of the app and its interactivity. This included a login page, a registration page and our home page in which has a map and events nearby you.
* MongoDB Atlas was used for back-end, we used it to store the users’ login and personal information along with events and their details.
* This link provides you with the Github repository of “On the Radar.” <https://github.com/maxerenberg/hackthevalley4/tree/master/app/src/main/java/com/hackthevalley4/hackthevalleyiv/controller>
* We also designed a prototype using Figma to plan out how the app could potentially look like.
The prototype’s link → <https://www.figma.com/proto/iKQ5ypH54mBKbhpLZDSzPX/On-The-Radar?node-id=13%3A0&scaling=scale-down>
* We also used a framework called Bootstrap to make our website. In this project, our team uploaded the website files through Github.
The website’s code → <https://github.com/arianneghislainerull/arianneghislainerull.github.io>
The website’s link → <https://flyingovertheradar.space/#>

*Look us up at*

# <http://flyingovertheradar.space>
## Inspiration

As first-year students, we have experienced the difficulties of navigating our way around our new home. We wanted to facilitate the transition to university by helping students learn more about their university campus.

## What it does

A social media app for students to share daily images of their campus and earn points by accurately guessing the locations of their friend's image. After guessing, students can explore the location in full with detailed maps, including within university buildings.

## How we built it

Mapped-in SDK was used to display user locations in relation to surrounding buildings and help identify different campus areas. Reactjs was used as a mobile website as the SDK was unavailable for mobile. Express and Node for backend, and MongoDB Atlas serves as the backend for flexible datatypes.

## Challenges we ran into

* Developing in an unfamiliar framework (React) after learning that Android Studio was not feasible
* Bypassing CORS permissions when accessing the user's camera

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

* Using a new SDK purposely to address an issue that was relevant to our team
* Going through the development process, and gaining a range of experiences over a short period of time

## What we learned

* Planning time effectively and redirecting our goals accordingly
* How to learn by collaborating with team members to SDK experts, as well as reading documentation.
* Our tech stack

## What's next for LooGuessr

* creating more social elements, such as a global leaderboard/tournaments to increase engagement beyond first years
* considering freemium components, such as extra guesses, 360-view, and interpersonal wagers
* showcasing 360-picture view by stitching together a video recording from the user
* addressing privacy concerns with image face blur and an option for delaying showing the image
## Inspiration

As college students learning to be socially responsible global citizens, we realized that it's important for all community members to feel a sense of ownership, responsibility, and equal access toward shared public spaces. Often, our interactions with public spaces inspire us to take action to help others in the community by initiating improvements and bringing up issues that need fixing. However, these issues don't always get addressed efficiently, in a way that empowers citizens to continue feeling that sense of ownership, or sometimes even at all! So, we devised a way to help FixIt for them!

## What it does

Our app provides a way for users to report Issues in their communities with the click of a button. They can also vote on existing Issues that they want Fixed! This crowdsourcing platform leverages the power of collective individuals to raise awareness and improve public spaces by demonstrating a collective effort for change to the individuals responsible for enacting it. For example, city officials who hear in passing that a broken faucet in a public park restroom needs fixing might not perceive a significant sense of urgency to initiate repairs, but they would get a different picture when 50+ individuals want them to FixIt now!

## How we built it

We started out by brainstorming use cases for our app and and discussing the populations we want to target with our app. Next, we discussed the main features of the app that we needed to ensure full functionality to serve these populations. We collectively decided to use Android Studio to build an Android app and use the Google Maps API to have an interactive map display.

## Challenges we ran into

Our team had little to no exposure to Android SDK before so we experienced a steep learning curve while developing a functional prototype in 36 hours. The Google Maps API took a lot of patience for us to get working and figuring out certain UI elements. We are very happy with our end result and all the skills we learned in 36 hours!

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are most proud of what we learned, how we grew as designers and programmers, and what we built with limited experience! As we were designing this app, we not only learned more about app design and technical expertise with the Google Maps API, but we also explored our roles as engineers that are also citizens. Empathizing with our user group showed us a clear way to lay out the key features of the app that we wanted to build and helped us create an efficient design and clear display.

## What we learned

As we mentioned above, this project helped us learn more about the design process, Android Studio, the Google Maps API, and also what it means to be a global citizen who wants to actively participate in the community! The technical skills we gained put us in an excellent position to continue growing!

## What's next for FixIt

An Issue’s Perspective

 \* Progress bar, fancier rating system

 \* Crowdfunding

A Finder’s Perspective

 \* Filter Issues, badges/incentive system

A Fixer’s Perspective

 \* Filter Issues off scores, Trending Issues