Bubbler

Inspiration

We like staying hydrated but we often find it difficult to locate nearby drinking fountains, especially ones with fresh, cold water. This is often the primary deterrent to filling up our water bottles.

What it does

Our project maps water fountains on each floor of Tech. Users can see location details, filter status, average rating out of 5, and number of ratings. They can also update the status if it doesn't match what's shown, as well as rate it themselves.

How we built it

We built it using React on the frontend with Firebase for the backend, including Firestore as our database and Cloud Functions written in Python as our API.

Challenges we ran into

Two of the biggest challenges we faced were establishing our API endpoints to interact with the database and learning to navigate React (specifically, overlaying the fountain locations onto the background image).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

For three out of the four us this was our first hackathon and two out of four of us are non-CS majors (CE and EE, so CS adjacent). We also had very little collective experience with the frameworks/languages we used so there were many hurdles. We're proud that we were able to tackle every challenge as an opportunity to learn.

What we learned

This taught us a ton about the software development process, from idea to execution. Given our lack of experience, pretty much every aspect of the project required us to absorb new knowledge. Based on what we've done, we feel much more confident that we'll be able to hit the ground running on future projects (and next years Hackathon!).

What's next for Bubbler

If we were able to continue Bubbler, we'd want to have the ability to map water fountains for many different public buildings and campuses. However, this would likely require already having access to building floor plans ahead of time and it wouldn't be sustainable from a development standpoint. So looking beyond water fountains, it'd be really interesting if there was a general platform that allowed people to crowdsource the mapping of floor plans for different public buildings and include detailed information about the building's amenities, like water fountains, bathrooms, etc.