Inspiration
A lot of the people on our team are immigrants to Ontario for college and struggled a lot our first year here because we didn’t know what resources were available to us, and Sheridan’s website wasn’t the most navigatable. We didn’t know what to cook, where to buy foods from our home cultures, or where to find a doctor or pharmacy near us, there was an unlimited amount of struggles, that we found a solution to.
What it does
Our website has three functions, all related to solving the struggle of moving to a new place.
Firstly, it has a foods section, where there is a list (that people can add to!) of cheap and affordable recipes to make. In addition to that, there’s a directory of different ethnic grocery stores to show people that there is diversity available, and where one can find them.
Secondly, there’s a directory of useful resources, where if one puts in their address it shows you nearby government offices, healthcare, shopping centres, and home supplies.
Thirdly, there’s a section dedicated to simplifying different college websites in the GTA. In our website, we used Sheridan College as an example, which includes easy access to healthcare plans, a simplified academic calendar, and other accessibilities, all to ease the struggle of having to scavenge Sheridan’s (or other colleges) websites and showing in general what one might not have known is available.
How we built it
First, we used Figma to mock up what we wanted our website and its functions to look like, then prototyped it all to view how one would navigate the site. We used the MVC core Web App template of asp.net in Visual Studio. We started adding views and extra files to the bootstrap, files which brought the style and some other additions. We deployed the app in Heroku and started following our Figma draft.
Please note there are discrepancies between the figma and the website
Challenges we ran into
We did seem to have bitten off more than we could chew with this project given the time constraints and the limits of our skills, especially in the backend of the website, but we did manage to get a general format delivered. Some things we struggled with was aligning items vertically, Using grids and flexbox, learning Bootstrap on the fly, and integrating information from maps and specific locations onto the website.
In addition, there was a lot of manually searching for information (such as the college directory) that was too much to include because of how wide our scope was.
Please note that the main functional maps in our prototype are Resources > Health Servies > Hospitals, and Resources > Clothing >Thriftshops. The others we experienced problems coding.
Accomplishments that we’re proud of
Managing to pull a complete Asp.Net Core web App project, managing a GitHub Project with a team for the first time, and learning how to fix errors that unusually arise in vs code when trying to connect and extract external NuGet Packages
What we learned
We learned that we should assess our capabilities in regards to our time with a little more care, and narrow the scope of our project to that time and skill frame.
What’s next for GTA: Grand Theft Advice
Because we couldn’t fully accomplish all the functions we wanted, that would be our next step. We would have all the colleges in the GTA added to the website, so it can available to a wide variety of newcomers to college.
Secondly, we wanted to customize the data from google maps into a more visually appealing display, so it wouldn’t just be an embedded map on the site, but rather more like icons that show the distance, address, and a number of each location listed, almost like how Uber Eats is set up.
Thirdly, for the foods section, we really wanted this website to be added on by people who use it and to have a part of the recipes section where people can add their own, sharing to others who might not know what to eat or cook. There’s a lot of resources in this world, and for those of us who are new to finding independence, our end goal is to spread easy accessibility and knowledge to as many as we can.
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