Check out the Website Here
Inspiration
I have always been passionate about the ocean, ever since I was a little kid. Every person in my family was aa diver, so naturally I loved doing it too. Eventually, I signed up to be a Reef Ranger in high school. I didn't understand what the big issue was with lionfish, but I figured if I could put "team lead of Reef Team 6" on my college resume and get to go spearfishing then I was ok with it. It was a sobering experience, though, once I realized exactly how bad the lionfish invasion was. Ever since then, this has been an extreme passion of mine. I think invasive species are one of the most important issues for us to solve for greater sustainability.
What it does
Coral Safari is a hub for all people to get any resource they need in the fight against lionfish. To find lionfish, go to the homepage and find a tagged lionfish in your area. As users find lionfish, they tag them. Eventually, a user-driven lattice of geotags will provide ample opportunity at catching your lionfish. If you enjoyed a spot, you can like it. If you didn't find any lionfish, you can dislike it. This gives the user base self-moderation power in deciding which tags stay up or get taken down. To learn how to catch lionfish, go to the catch section and learn local laws and required gear. To learn how to clean lionfish, go follow the step by step guides in the catch section. To learn how to cook lionfish, The Coral Safari offers plenty of recipes gathered dynamically from across the web. The Coral Safari removes any excuses and adds all the motivation for you to join the fight against lionfish.
How we built it
The Coral Safari was built in ReactJs and deployed through Google Firebase. It relies on the Google maps and places API's, the contentful Management SDK, and the contentful content delivery api accessed through GraphQL. Finally it uses the onwater.io api for input verification. Contentful stores all marked data and recipe data, which is then parsed and integrated into the Google maps interface.
Challenges we ran into
By far the most difficult part of this whole competition was hosting the website itself. I had never done that before and it caused really odd bugs that weren't present when hosting the site on my local machine. I'm still not 100% sure how the whole thing works, but It's so cool having a real website.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
I'm very proud of the entire project. I had a vision going into this competition, and I think I was able to make most of it happened. No matter how much web development I do, I am never comfortable with styling, so making a website that looks decent is a big thing for me.
What we learned
I do not make good pitch videos at 3:30am.
What's next for Coral Safari
There's a whole section on the website dedicated to this. I plan to add user accounts for better verification, along with plenty of bug fixes and quality of life improvements. Two big things I would like to add are a mobile app and a restaurant outreach program where restaurants can host a 'recipe of the month' to encourage people to eat lionfish and encourage restaurants to serve lionfish. I promise you they are very tasty.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.