Ascend UMass

Inspiration

I really enjoyed climbing, but found that there was no easy way to track the progress that I've made over several weeks. I also had trouble on certain routes, but could only think through how to climb it when I was at the gym. Also the community has been overwhelmingly supportive, and I wanted to give back to that community by offering an simple way to bring us closer together.

What it does

It is an app that allows you to sign in and track your progress. Once signed in, you can see a top down perspective of the climbing gym and select portions of the wall to view. You will then be showed a picture of the wall where you can select different routes. After selecting a route, that route will be highlighted and a bubble will pop up with the details. You can also view videos of other people climbing that route if you need help, as well as submit your own videos for others to watch. Additionally, you can submit verification videos and earn points to get on a public leaderboard. There will also be a forum tab where you can discuss fun routes and alternative methods of climbing them, as well as an announcement tab for the staff to announce any changes to hours of operations and upcoming changes to the wall so you can complete the climbs before they get changed.

How we built it

We used a frontend of Flutter, as well as REST, Spring Boot, AWS for the backend

Challenges we ran into

Most of us were novices at app development, so it was a challenge to get the template up and running for the frontend, but afterward, we could divide tasks easily by assigning different tabs to different people. Connecting the backend to the frontend was also a difficult task, as we came up with lots of different features that required lots of different APIs, frameworks, databases, etc. We definitely bit off more than we could chew in the short hackathon period, but we plan to continue to update the app with features in the future.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creating our first app that not only solves a problem, but brings the UMass community closer together. I am also personally happy that I got to see my idea come to life, as it was many of our first app development experience.

What we learned

Creating an App is definitely going to be easier in the future, as we learned the basics. It now mainly comes down to what specialized functions we want to add to this app or others.

What's next for Ascend UMass

We're planning to release new features, such as a peak hours graph, friend system, and many more! We also hope to clean up the interface to be more aesthetically pleasing. We're excited to bring more features to the wonderful bouldering community at UMass!