Can I? - The Covid Watch

Inspiration

As current students in the area of medicine, we feel deeply connected to the COVID-19 situation. Seeing how overwhelming all the changing information is and how easy it is to miss out on some ongoing updates, we thought of resolving this issue. The idea revolves around an app which summarises the key points on the current regulations established by the UK government. This would make the information more accessible and understandable, as well as being a good information hub.

The app

The current information on COVID-19 restrictions and permissions has all of us overwhelmed with the never-ending can or cannot do's. Who can we visit? Where can we travel? Can we exercise? "Can I?" is the app which resolves this and puts an end to all the possible confusion. By filling some basic information, "Can I?" is able to provide you with all the necessary updates to answer your questions. The home page will entail the main updates regarding people, places, food, exercise, etc. Each of these sections can be explored further by clicking on them. Colours such as green for the new possibilities offered, red for the unfortunate can't do's and white for the continuous updates are used to facilitate user understanding. It also includes a calendar section to provide an overall and general view on the following restrictions changes and when these will come to an end.

How we built it

"Can I?" was built using the Xcode software and SWIFT language.

Challenges

As biomedical students, coding is not part of our daily lives. This presented great difficulty, very great indeed, when it came to start our project. The only coding languages we were familiar to were R, CSS and some HTML and JavaScript. Therefore, as complete beginners using Xcode was somewhat nerve-racking and stressful. One of our biggest challenges was choosing which coding language was the most appropriate and how to actually start the coding.

Accomplishments

We are incredibly proud of our app idea as we believe it has great potential in being helpful to the British population. Considering our lack of coding skills and the short amount of time, we are happy of the result we are providing. Another of our accomplishments is the fact that we were all united in order to approach the various problems and tried to find solutions. Being able to relate and share our frustrations altogether made us a stronger group.

What we learned

The HackHerThon has opened our eyes to the intricate and puzzling world of what coding is. The amount of possibilities we encountered were endless. Every tiny detail matters. We learned the different coding languages and their use as well as how to use the terminal tab with some basic codes.