Inspiration
Everyone has a moment when they wish to escape their day and browse their phone. Facebook and Instagram offer ways of tuning into people's lives - but what if you had an app that could help you confront problems in the world today in a visually and statistically interesting way? Discover combines social awareness and calls-to-action for a better world.
What it does
Discover allows you to browse the geographic satellite map of the world, zoom in to a region, and read statistics on the latest education, health, development, and social issues in the country. You can then donate to a charity of a specific region to help a particular cause or campaign.
How We built it
We used the Urthecast API to show a zoomable satellite image of a location. The view is then generated in an Android app, which also uses the World Bank open data to parse the latest statistics about a particular country and topic to display on the screen. Then the app connects to a website that uses the Braintree API to simplify the payment process of region-specific charities.
Challenges We ran into
We had trouble with git throughout the project and we somehow couldn't pull each other's code without it affecting the machine specific IDE settings. It took us a long time to get on the same page and find an efficient way to manually merge our projects.
Accomplishments that we proud of
Even though us four hackers come from different backgrounds, we worked together to accentuate our strengths and support our weaknesses. A neuroscience major, an arts major, a high school student, and a computer science second year- even if it seemed unlikely, we were able to make this project happen as a collaborative team.
What I learned
We learned to utilize many APIs into our project and work around the restrictions of the implementations by adding our own filters and parsing through files to find the data we need.
What's next for Discover
Discover wants to go far. We want to incorporate even more charities into our app and more detailed statistics on each region that can be updated live with local news integration and disaster donation alerts.
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