COVID-19 Service Provider

Inspiration

With the increasing prominence of COVID-19, the first-responders of this pandemic face increasing issues in performing various day-to-day tasks, such as buying groceries, finding places to live, and taking care of their children. Thus, we wanted to create a webpage that acts as a medium for volunteers to provide services to the first responders according to their needs.

What it does

The website has two separate screens for volunteers and first-responders. Volunteers will able to choose from the services of housing, providing groceries, and childcare, in addition to providing their name and other credentials. Based on the services they choose, additional questions will appear regarding these species areas. Based on the location of the first-responders and their needs, markers will appear on the map that allow them to locate people in their area for either housing, providing groceries, and childcare.

How we built it

Firebase realtime database is a Google-based cloud NOSQL database. It also allowed us to register callbacks to update our UI/maps. We used Google-geocoding API to position the map based on the user's current position. Google maps API were used extensively to display markers on the volunteer positions.

Challenges we ran into

Understanding how the google APIs work and establishing an API key for accessing them is an important learning experience for us. Also understanding the non-traditional asynchronous callback mechanism of Firebase datastore was a key challenge that took us a while to figure out.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to create a webpage in such a short amount of time. Although the webpage is not the most appealing visually, we were still able to create a service provider for the first-responders of COVID-19 as novices. It runs the way we want it to, and notifies us of incorrectly entered fields as well.

What we learned

We learned how to use HTML and Javascript, and abut web development in general. Additionally, we were able to learn about how the Firebase database and Google Maps API worked, which will help us greatly in future projects.

What's next for COVID-19 Service Provider

We want to focus on making the website more visually appealing, as well as adding more services based on the first-responder's needs (plasma donation, etc).