Our inspiration
We often witness trails of lost items announcements posted in various NUS Telegram groups. This inspired us to create a Telegram bot which consolidates all lost items found by students in the NUS campus.
What it does
Our Telegram bot categorises the lost items into 4 main categories. Tapping on one category will bring you into another menu of sub-categories. For example, the main category "Personal" will bring you to another menu with sub-categories, "Identification, Valuables, Electronics and Essentials" If a user finds a lost item under the said category, the user can send images of the lost items coupled with a description to the Telegram bot. Likewise, a user may scroll through the messages under the said category to find his lost item.
Challenges we faced
We were coding the Telegram bot using Python. Unfortunately, no one in the group had experience working with the Python language. We took much time figuring out the language and were unsure of how backend components, such as databases worked. It took a lot of time and trial and error to get our program to work.
What we learned
This is the our group's first hackathon. This hackathon really challenged our limits as we explored a coding language that is new to us and researched tirelessly so that our Telegram bot can function as intended. Despite the numerous struggles faced and our lack of experience, we will treat this hackathon as a stepping stone.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.