Mason Watch

Big George is always watching

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Inspiration

Have you ever lost something due to theft? Have you ever felt unsafe in a specific location? Or have you ever just wanted to know what is happening on campus? Well, now you can know what crimes take place on campus, with mason watch.

What it does

Mason watch takes crimes that are reported on the daily Crime and Fire log and logs those crimes that happened on campus and displays them on a map of Mason, with certain metadata attached: time, location, occurrences, and crime name. Mason Watch also has a form for student-reported crimes, so students can contribute to a better, safer mason. The Mason Watch map updates every 15 minutes to ensure student safety and crime reliability, making sure that each and every crime is accounted for.

How we built it

We pulled information from the daily crime and fire log and sent that data to a Google Excel sheet, then we linked those sheets to Looker Studio in order to make a live map of the crimes and metadata associated with those crimes. We also made sure to make the crime map update every 15 minutes and made a macro that was a google form that connected to the sheets in order for students to report crimes.

Challenges we ran into

Getting the map to update live and not be static and trying to pull data from the mason Crime and Fire log and putting it into our database.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We made a working live crime map that shows crimes that have happened on mason, the date of those crimes, how many times those crimes have happened in a certain area, and general statistics about crime on mason that makes students more aware, and in turn, safe.

What we learned

We learned how to use macros to have a live working google sheets database, we learned how to make a live working updated map that takes data from a database, and we learned how to use HTML.

What's next for Mason Watch

We plan to make the website more user-friendly, and we may make an app in the future.

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