(We were told to submit our demo video link here:) link
Welcome!!
Inspiration
One of our members is a student in Bienen, and they struggled with finding open practice rooms to play their instrument, or worse, biking ALL THE WAY from North Campus to Bienen and finding all the rooms were full. We initially thought of the idea to track room occupancy as a lifehack, but realized there was lots of potential to build this as a health tool as well, because if someone tests positive and reports that to us, we can inform other practice room occupants and help keep our comghfdsbkg
What it does
Our platform has 2 main parts. First is the practice room occupancy tracker. Our website displays a map of campus with markers for every building that contains practice rooms accessible to students. By clicking on a building, you're taken to a floor plan view of that building, with a marker for every practice room which is red if the room is occupied, and green if the room is open. You can then go to that room in that building, where there will be a QR code you can scan on your phone, sign in with your NetID, and Checkin to that room. The website will then be updated to show the room is occupied, and when you're done practicing, you can scan the QR code again to Checkout.
This is useful if you want to see what rooms are available, but we wanted to do more to make this a health tool! So, by keeping track of the last checkout time, we can also show people when a practice room was last used. This lets people decide which practice room they feel most comfortable using with respect to COVID precaution. Additionally, we wanted to build a project which helps with Northwestern's existing contact tracing efforts. So, we added a button on our homepage which allows a user to report that they've tested positive for COVID. We then take this information, and send an alert email to the inbox of any students who occupied the space within the window the CDC declares an indoor space has a risk of carrying/spreading COVID; 72 hours.
This way, our project provides a useful service to the community in real time occupancy tracking, and also helps keep Northwestern healthy by tracking room usage and helping to contact trace for COVID.
How we built it
Our group wanted to aim high in this hackathon, so we decided to use tools none of us were familiar with. The heavy lifters of our project were the frameworks Django and ReactJS. We divided our team into 2 parts, a front end team, and a back end team. The front end team used a combination of html pages and react components to display a real map, markers on that map, and all of our display pages. The back end team used django to create and run a database of users, rooms, and room checkins/checkouts. We then used the RESTful API to have our front end and back end communicate, and we also used the twilio SendGrid API to send emails to our users being contacted about COVID Exposure.
Challenges we ran into
This project was full of challenges! The most significant of which was getting up to speed on the various frameworks we decided to use. Getting the hang of complicated tools to accomplish our goal in such a short time was really tough and is something we're really proud of.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're really excited to have completed such a solid proof of concept/MVP within the deadline window. All of the features we planned on implementing work, and we're really happy with what we've come up with!
What's next for BetterPractice
We do really believe in this product as an opportunity to do good for Northwestern students. We're all pretty excited about this idea, and now that we have our demo working, we want to take the time after wildhacks to do a deep dive and make this a polished project. We plan to add more rooms, integrate with Northwestern SSO properly, make a more accessible and functional website, and get BetterPractice QR codes in all practice spaces on campus so we can have a more convenient, health-aware, and overall better practice experience.
THANK YOU!!
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