KnowGo

KnowGo UI

Inspiration

We were inspired by our collective experiences of wondering whether an area we were planning on traveling through was safe or not. It was often very hard to find an answer to that question fast enough to make a quick decision about whether or not to change travel plans, and we thought this app would be a perfect solution to that issue.

What it does

KnowGo renders a map of the user's surrounding location and overlays a heat map representing the level of crime in each area. At it's current state, the user must be located in Houston and is able to see levels of crime only in the Houston area. The app allows for a quick visual assessment of the safety of a given area.

How we built it

We built the cross-platform app completely using react-native. We developed it with VSCode liveshare and pushed each new working version into Github. The data for crime rates were drawn from the Houston police department official reports.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was the rendering of the heat map when the user zoomed in past a certain point. After doing some research, we found out that it was a known bug with react-native heat maps and were unable to find a solution. We also found it difficult to find a free API with the data that we wanted to so we eventually decided to take a snapshot of the last two months to use as data.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Something we are proud of is the fact that none of us had any prior react-native experience and yet we were able to figure out how to make this app. It took us a while to learn the basics of react-native and then all of the different methods and components for map views and heat maps, but we were able to learn it in the short time we were given. We were also proud of being able to generate the heat map correctly and in a way that it gave the user easy access to the information they were looking for.

What we learned

The biggest thing that we learned was how to use react-native and it's map libraries, since none of us had any prior experience. We also learned a lot about APIs and how to connect to them despite us ultimately choosing to take a different route that did not use APIs. Finally, we learned how to effectively split up our work while still helping each other and collaborating, which is arguably the most important takeaway from this project.

What's next for KnowGo

What have a lot of future steps envisioned for KnowGo. First, we have to find a way to either fix the bug with heat map rendering or find an alternate solution. We then hope to connect an API to KnowGo to give live time data to the user and be able to support locations outside of Houston. We also want to add a menu bar where users can select how precise the heat map is (how large the samples for each section of crime data are). Finally, we want to add a route finder functionality to both see your current route safety and choose potentially safer routes.