Inspiration
Not a school day goes by where my fellow students and I witness frustrating crimes, such as:
- people vaping in the bathrooms
- selling drugs, like painkillers
- smoking weed in corners
We are always annoyed by our school's bathrooms being unavailable due to the perpetual odor of cotton candy flavored vape and the bathrooms packed with drug users. However, there is never a reasonable way to report this unlawful behavior without being late to class. I wanted to do something about this issue.
This is why I created MCHSafe, a mobile app that allows school students to report criminal activity in their exact location and time that it's happening. This app is highly applicable to both MCHS and other high schools.
What it does
MCHSafe allows users to login and report crimes in real-time at their exact location on the campus map. A notification is immediately sent to campus supervisors and/or administrators, allowing them to deal with the problem instantly instead of ignoring delayed complaints. Users are anonymous to other students to preserve their safety, but admins can see who reported. (to combat people spamming the app or providing fake information)
How we built it
MCHSafe is built with Kotlin, NextJS, and MongoDB. Originally I was going to use a simpler framework like Flutter, but I quickly realized that the app's core functions like simultaneous reporting, school campus specialization, and controlled login required a more powerful implementation.
Challenges we ran into
I had a really limited understanding of the Kotlin language before, but I've improved my skills significantly and feel more confident about creating complex applications, as well as continuing to develop MCHSafe! I'm also proud that I was able to code so much in a few days.
Improvements + What's next for MCHSafe
Oh boy there are a LOT of issues. Because of the strict timeline, the code is relatively messy and I need to clean up random/redundant files. Also, I need to actually deploy the app (lol) to make it accessible to all users, as it is currently only running on my computer's android studio.
Once I clean up those loose ends, this app has enormous potential to be used at not just my school, Maria Carrillo, but other high schools that face the same problems. Even if it's not the exact app itself that's used, this concept and my implementation would allow school to to finally conquer their crime problems instead of ignoring them.
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