Gaydar

Inspiration

Our inspiration came from two places. One is the lack of resources to guide individuals to gender neutral bathrooms. Our other inspiration was the idea to have a website with six tabs with the six colors of the pride flag, and having a different resource corresponding to each tab.

What it does

What we would hope for our page to do is to provide a compiled source of guidance and resources from anything from if your nearest gender neutral bathroom is open, to sexual health resources, to a real-time messaging spot for queer peer counselors to offer guidance remotely.

Here are the colors for each tab and their planned content.

Hot pink: sexual health resources Red: gay culture/news Orange: queer peer counseling and diary tracker Yellow: map of resources/bathrooms Green: horoscopes! Turquoise: printable, LGBTQ+ themed coloring pages Indigo: breathing and meditation exercises Violet: list of hotlines

How we Built It

Although we ran into technical challenges in actualizing this project, our development process would involve using a lightweight framework for Node.js or NPM with development support for HTML and CSS to create the project as a mobile app. The HTML structure would involve use of the publicly available Google Maps API.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many challenges. Different members of our team had different skill sets, and we didn't know how to integrate those into our project. Additionally, we all had little to no experience with app or web development. We were also unsure how to tackle the creation of a map (in the style of google maps) that would allow us independence in creation while not being too time-consuming to implement. We received many ideas for how to approach this problem from various mentors, but ultimately found the time constraints to be too much for us to progress much further.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We tried new things! We learned a lot about different resources for building projects, what API's are, where we can go to learn the things we don't know, and more. One wise mentor told us it's important to get to the point where you know what you don't know, so you can learn those things. Now that we know what we don't know, we feel we can progress with confidence.

What we learned

We learned about API's, different methods to develop web apps, and we also individually learned about various topics through the workshops offered during this hackathon, such as deep learning, how to deal with impostor syndrome, and game development with Unity.

What's next for Gaydar

Implementing everything! Also, crowdsourcing with machine learning for map marker updating for the bathroom project.