Albino Squirrel Tracker

Inspiration

People are always searching for the albino squirrel before they go to that intimidating calculus midterm, or maybe just to snap a rare picture of it for Instagram! It's so hard to find a tiny white squirrel among its brethren on the University of Texas at Austin's campus, so why not work with synergy to track the almighty good luck creature?

What it does

People submit a picture of the albino squirrel and the phone drops a pin on the map where the picture is located, so each time a squirrel is found, the pin is updated on the map.

How I built it

First, we designed specifications. Then, we split off into front end and back end teams, while a mentor, Jared, carried us to the final.

Challenges I ran into

In learning how to use our version control system, we failed to create multiple branches and instead pushed everything into a single master branch, which eventually broke our code. When one of us accidentally deleted a key file which broke our program, we had to spend several hours, a) figuring out what the problem was, and b) fixing the issue.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Creating a functional app for the first time is a huge accomplishment.

What I learned

I learned how to integrate mobile apps with servers(Parse). Additionally, we learned how to use different API's(Google Map Studio) to make our lives easier in coding an application. We learned the xml required to make the front end of the apps and the specificities of Android Development, even though it's in Java.