Live! Durham

Inspiration

We were inspired by our collective love of exercise and our collective struggle to find good places to work out outside. Some of us live on Duke’s campus, so we had access to Wilson Gym starting a month into the semester. However, we still wanted to have the opportunity to work out outdoors, because we felt cloistered in our dorms and generally limited in our ability to be outdoors and take advantage of the lovely Durham fall weather. In trying to find good places to exercise, we often returned to the same elementary school with limited options and relatively old facilities. This program addresses our needs and those of the thousands of other Durham residents who don’t even have access to an indoor gym.

What it does

We are submitting a website to the health and wellness track. Our website is designed to generate a list of parks in Durham best suited for the user’s workout needs: the user can select from several workout options, such as “Cardio”, “Basketball”, or “Weight training - upper body”, and the website’s algorithm will filter through a list of Durham parks and recreation options to return a list of parks that match the user’s criteria.

How we built it

We began construction of this program by using an HTML template to help set up our website. After changing the appearance of the website via HTML and CSS, we turned to Javascript for the main functionality of the website. Our Javascript code uses arrays and a hash map to qualify the desired characteristics of each park; it then filters through the parks and returns the park(s) with the highest number of characteristic matches to the user’s input.

Challenges we ran into

While coding was generally straightforward, we ran into challenges with website design given that none of us are particularly experienced in CSS. We also struggled a bit to ensure full functionality; for quite some time, we could only manage to generate a list of parks that matched the user’s first selection. It took some time to filter parks based on several inputs (i.e. cardio AND basketball AND lower body weight training rather than just one of those options), but we were ultimately able to do so.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud to have constructed a functional, interactive website that helps users be their best every day. We weren’t sure what to expect going into this, as none of us had truly participated in a Hackathon before, but we knew we wanted to submit some sort of working product, and we did.

What we learned

We each learned a lot about the different languages that we used to create the website. I had very limited experience with HTML and CSS and no experience in JavaScript, and I now know basic functions for each of those languages. We also learned about the general process required for tech-related group projects, which will be helpful to us in the long run as we each enter the industry in a professional capacity.

What's next for Live! Durham

We hope to continue to make adjustments to the website, and potentially link it to Google APIs to scrape the web for park features and locations. At some point, we’d like to add the user’s location as an input to find the closest parks that match the user’s input.