Mapping Through Pitt

Inspiration

Since there is not currently a designated visual directory for where to find food and study places around Pitt’s campus, we wanted to create something that would help incoming students. It also is mean for accessibility because it shows places that align with individual dietary necessities and preferences.

What it does

It maps on-campus food venues and shows where to get food and study spots.

How we built it

As we parsed through the internet, we found a lot of things relating to mapping platforms and their APIs. But, we were having trouble implementing and utilizing these things. After a few hours of searching, trying, and almost crying, we found out that Python has a library called folium, which does all the map making for you. So now, we needed to add the extra features of where places to eat, study, etc were. We got the latitudes and longitudes of the different locations in order to make the markers. We also wanted to implement a search tool, so that users could find specific places. At first, we tried to use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to make a search tool but then we found out that folium had a search in-built. And this is where we faced our biggest challenge.

Challenges we ran into

Implementing a search bar into the Folium library proved to be a lot harder than we expected, and once we were able to get a search bar, we were not able to get it to function

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to read the documentation for the folium library and learn how to use it within our project while also enhancing our coding skills.

What we learned

We learned how to create a website using different programming languages such as: javascript, CSS, HTML, Python. As we tried to implement the folium library and the search bar into our website, we also learned how to utilize information online effectively as well as how to work productively as a team by communicating and utilizing our time to complete the project.

What's next for Mapping Through Pitt

In the future, we could add features to find where you can use dining dollars (on- and off-campus, input an on-campus building and output suggestions of where to eat, etc) and implement a functional search bar. Another feature could allow users to upload their schedules, and an algorithm to map out the optimally places to grab food in between classes. Expanding it into an app that could be used on cell phones would be a possibility as well.