Flusher

Inspiration

When our team first got to the hackathon, none of us knew where the bathroom was. This led to some confusion and trouble. By chance, one of our team members got her period that exact same time, so it was extra ironic for us to not know where the bathroom was. From this silly mistake evolved an idea.

What it does

Flusher is an app which displays public bathrooms nearest to you. It uses Google Maps technology combined with user feedback in order to generate a map of bathrooms in the Bay Area. Using Flusher, you can locate the nearest bathroom near you, and based on past user's ratings of the bathrooms, choose a bathroom that suits your needs. The app filters the bathrooms into categories based on cleanliness, efficiency, gender-neutral, gender-separate, wheelchair accessible, its access to feminine hygiene projects, and the precense of a diaper-changing station. So whether you're a mother needing a bathroom with a diaper-changing station, or a germaphobe who just does not want to use a dirty, public bathroom, you can use this app to find the right public bathroom for you.

How we built it

All of our team had little programming experience before creating this app. Therefore, when one of our mentors suggested Invision, a mockup program to demonstrate how an app functions, we immediatly jumped on the idea. Quickly, we began to learn the ins and outs of mockup apps in order to create Flusher as realistically as possible over a mockup. However, we never gave up our dream of coding Flusher. One of our team members began to learn Angular.js. She used Angular.js to begin programming the fundementals of Flusher, which supplements our mockup version. Eventually, we hope to code Flusher into reality from the program.

Challenges we ran into

Our team ran into many challenges throughout this hackathon. The first challenge we faced was that none of us had any significant coding experience. Of course, all of us had toyed around with arithmetic in various languages, but none of us had really taken our coding skills to the next level. This made it pretty difficult (and sometimes frustrating) to learn the languages so quickly overnight. We also ran into a challenge where we would need a Google Maps key in order to supplement Flusher with Google Maps. To deal with this challenge, we just decided to use an image of a map to represent what the Google Maps function would do in real life. However, we plan on implementing Google Maps into our app once we have a key in the future.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team is extremly proud that we were able to tackle various programming and ideating tactics in such a short amount of time. Even though it was frustrating, we all were able to learn the various programs (Invision, Inkscape, Angular.js) very well before the end of the night. I think we also are pretty proud of the fact that we all stayed up the majority of the night (and 3 of us stayed up all night) because we never thought we could pull an all-nighter off. However, the project was defintily interesting enough to make pulling an all-nighter relativly easy.

What we learned

All of us learned a ton today about coding and what it takes to be a coder. Since none of us knew very much code before this program, we had to pull a crash course in order to learn Angular.js and Invision before we actually started our program. We were also able to learn how so many different programs were intergrated into themselves. In order to code this app, we had to work across so many different programs and run them from interchangibly, which we never would have expected before today. We learned about graphic design too, and how to market and pitch and app in one of the sessions. Our team learned a lot over one night, and we hope to keep countinuing to learn code in the future.

What's next for Flusher

Next, we want to expand Flusher into real code. We already have an idea, so now our job will just be to learn how to execute it. We already got into the coding a bit today, but there is defintily a lot we could do in order to code the app completly. We want to meet afterschool in order to accomplish this.