Findr

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  Brody Study Rooms Location with equipment and amenities included.

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  Brody Atrium Location with equipment and amenities included.

Findr: Personalized campus navigation made by students for students.

Inspiration

As a group of Hopkins students that are still in the process of getting to know the ins and outs of campus as sophomores, we found that we wanted to find some way to make it easier to find exactly what we were looking for in study and entertainment spaces in the Homewood campus.

What it does

We created an application in which the user answers a few simple questions, and Findr gives the user the top match from 16 different locations that best match the user's study preferences in a clean, swipe-able UI.

How we built it

frontend: The frontend was created using Android Studio, creating fragments for each page and implementing buttons, photos, and text to create the user interface.

backend: The backend was coded in Java, creating object classes to store data about different locations. We defined new methods to help find the best match given the preferences. We ultimately came up with a weighted score & ranking system for all locations as compared to the user's ideal location.

design: The design of the app was brainstormed and created using a combination of Canva and Procreate. Some of the photos of campus used in our application were also taken during this weekend.

Challenges we ran into

Most of our time was spent coming up with a plan for how to store the data for all of the locations, issues pushing/pulling from our git repository, and learning how to code in an entirely new environment with new concepts (Android Studio, fragments, etc). Another large chunk of our time was spent in figuring out the control flow for the app, as well as managing our new Location object class.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

For all of us, coding an app for Android is an entirely new experience. We're really proud of the fact that we were able to get a decent grasp on how coding for Android works, as well as all of us getting more familiar with GitHub and full-stack development.

What we learned

As well as getting a start to coding for Android and generally becoming more experienced as developers, this weekend we also had the opportunity to learn a lot about our school campus and what each place has to offer.

What's next for Findr

In the future, we would love to continue implementing a more robust system with more locations on the Homewood campus and more quality preferences as well as a focus on the details of campus accessibility.

Built With

• android-studio
• java