Peek-A-Sitter

Inspirationed

The Pandemic nearly destroyed the already weakened child care industry, in which busy parents are left to struggle with their jobs and take care of their children at the same time. However, that is no longer possible as the pandemic totally recedes because many parents will be forced to go back to work. This leaves them without a form of trustworthy childcare, which is important in convincing parents to leave their kids to third-party providers. Moreover, this issue extends to gender equity, as many moms have already left the workforce to fill in this hole. That is why we were inspired to create a program that can allow for more trust within the childcare system in order to promote the industry and allow parents, especially moms, to rejoin the workforce.

What it does

Our code allows parents to connect with babysitters and keep tags on their children, utilizing a two-profile login system. When creating an account with our website, you are given the choice to create either a babysitter or parent profile. Once both the babysitter and parent have created an account on our website, the parent can type in the email ID of the babysitter to connect with them. When this is done, a random number is assigned to the parent and the babysitter on our database in order to link their profiles. When profiles are linked, parents and babysitters share a profile on a separate database that will list all tasks the babysitter has completed.

How we built it

We built Peek-A-Sitter on the editor Atom, which allows us to link our HTML, CSS, and PHP code. We used xampp to launch a localhost server that we could test all of our code on. All of the pages were written in PHP, and they have multiple layers of security when creating a login system. Ifra dealt with the front end as well as the database portion, while Pranav worked on the logistics and task list page, deciding how everything would fit together.

Challenges we ran into

Setting up the database on MySQLi and linking the parent and babysitter emails was a challenge we ran into because we weren’t as experienced with databases. Furthermore, the challenge of integrating Javascript and PHP into a working website caused us to rethink our ways. We had trouble grabbing code from the Javascript file and adding it to the PHP database, making it tough to link the babysitter and parent profiles. Moreover, as we were using a language new to us, debugging code was more based on research rather than testing, which hurt our timing and prevented us from completely finishing the website and database.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Some accomplishments we are proud of is using PHP, which was new to both of us as we generally code in Python or other different languages. Also, using PHP in tandem with MySQLi allowed us to expand our knowledge in databases and shed light on many new possible project ideas.