Down

Are you Down? Create and Join events around your area to get some air and have some fun. Use the map to see which events are in your area and who's already down or to invite others to your own.

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Inspiration

We wanted people to be able to go outside and enjoy nature again. Over the last year, people have become less and less willing to go out and experience the world. We wanted to create something that would encourage people to go out and spend time with others in an outdoor setting.

What it does

Allows a user to create an account and once logged in, they should be able to see a map that will have any events that are going on around them. If they find an event that interests them, they can join the event which will show up for all other participants and viewers so that they can all know who's Down.

How we built it

We built Down using Flutter, Firebase, and Google Cloud Platform for the map api. We wanted to go out of our comfort zone so we chose Flutter to be our starting point which allows us to create an application that works on both Android and IOS without needing two written versions of the code. Along with Flutter, we chose to use Firebase to hold our data and we utilized Firebase's authentication as well as FireStore to hold our tables. The map is ran using Google Cloud Platform's api so that anyone, anywhere should be able to utilize the application anytime.

Challenges we ran into

Since we chose a language that we weren't very familiar with and a database that we have only barely tested, we struggled to get our starting point for the program and saw various small problems as we went through and discovered the functionality of all of the programs. In the end, we ensured that we used all of our intended functionality at least once so that we had a proof of concept for going forward.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to say that we made a functional, though not yet fully complete to our goals, application that runs on both Android and IOS. A couple of our members had some small experience with Flutter and Firebase but we are proud that even the 2 of us who came in fully unaware were able to learn the language and program within the 24 hours of this competition.

What we learned

We learned that while its nice to try new things, its best to prepare a bit more ahead of time. The application we made can still be pushed much further, and we plan to, but we weren't sure of what functionality we should expect to be completed within the timeframe that we were alloted. If we were to do an event like this again, we would be far more aware of the process that we used and would be able to make better plans and expectations for our accomplishments.

What's next for Down

We plan to continue expanding the program to include full profile pages, more user experience development in general, and we would like to add in-depth event creation such as planning events ahead of time, allowing participant limits and queues for when that limit is reached, and more.

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