Crossy Road

Inspiration

We were inspired to create Crossy Road by the experiences we've had trying to walk home safely, especially at night on urban campuses. Using data visualization, we believe we can help inform people of what areas to avoid, even as those areas grow, shrink, and change with time.

What it does

Crossy Road is a mobile app delivering people to their destinations safe and sound, using local crime reports to dodge danger hotspots. The home screen is a map displaying incidents of crime near your current location and allowing users to navigate from their current location to one they choose, avoiding areas with particularly dense crime reports. The next pages on the navigation bar display the most recent incidents nearby, save locations of interest, and provide a panel to adjust app and user profile settings.

How we built it

The app was primarily written in JavaScript and Python. We utilized the software framework React Native to build the app, and Python modules Pandas and NumPy in Google Colab for data preprocessing.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a few challenges creating Crossy Road. Our team had for the most part little to no experience with mobile app development and JavaScript, and we experienced several major technical difficulties as we were developing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Continuing off of the previous section, we are able to say we overcame these challenges and were able to make an app that we are proud to present to the world. We implemented most of the major features we'd originally envisioned for the app, and there is plenty to build on from here.

What we learned

We all took away different things from this project. Riya learned the power of perseverance, through the hours she spent debugging. Kevin had the opportunity to explore user interface design, and Jessica wrote code in JavaScript for the first time.

What's next for Crossy Road

Moving forward, we would like to integrate an API to enable a more guided route-finding user experience. We'd also like to have an option to share your location with friends or loved ones, and the ability to view previous trips taken. Adding more data to the map is also a priority.