Inspiration
Our inspiration for this webapp comes from a very simple fact of life, we love eating but we also wish to live a balanced and healthy lifestyle. But working out is difficult to stay motivated for. Our webapp lets users get immediate rewards for going on runs and keeps them motivated for future runs.
What it does
Our web app finds restaurants within a given radius, chosen by the user, and finds a route to walk there. It tracks the calories you’ve burnt during your journey, the time elapsed and the pace at which the user is walking/running. Our web app helps users find motivation to go on walks and provides them with immediate rewards for doing so. It also has a streak system, designed to keep users coming back for the betterment of their health.
How we built it
We started with making a visual outline of the UI/UX with Figma. We then transitioned into building our frontend by converting the markups into HTML and CSS. For our backend, we set up a connection to our local server and the Google Maps API. To be specific, we retrieved from the Google Maps API- a restaurant list, the location of these restaurants, the location of the user, the surrounding map and the route from the user’s location to destination. Lastly, we connected the frontend and backend, we used postman to test the APIs and we used Vultr servers to host a domain where we uploaded our HTML code and hosted our server on.
Challenges we ran into
A huge challenge we ran into was setting up the backend in general, things such as server issues and API integration was quite hard for us as beginner coders. API scope messed with the coordinates of certain locations. FIGMA was time consuming, and the icons weren't in unison with the design choices we had in mind. It was difficult to learn and master in such a short amount of time.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
An accomplishment we are proud of is learning how to use and integrate API given the short amount of time provided, none of us had any prior knowledge on APIs and there was definitely a learning curve. Full stack was also a lot more challenging than we expected as beginners, but it was very rewarding. In the end, we did manage to make a full working project and that is what we are most proud of.
What we learned
This was our first time making a progressive web app and we learned a lot along the way. We learned how to operate servers and integrate API into our project. We also learned that communication is key when it comes to big projects such as this, especially communication between the backend and frontend.
What's next for Big Back Run
Our next steps for Big Back Run would be to add better pathfinding for shorter routes and better restaurants and adding other stats to be tracked such as heart rate or steps taken. We hope to also add an option to have accounts so users can sync their devices and track their progress over time. A way to fund this would also be to add some ads for the restaurants we partner with, creating a cycle of consistent monetization for the web app and the restaurants.
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