Inspiration
The prompt: Create a project to encourage civil participation
Whether you are a young adult, professional, elderly, or someone who has just moved to a new city- often we find ourselves with no connection and those friends to who you aren't connected to. Some solutions are going to bars or other social events where you find yourself with no common interests or goals. Minerva makes it simple and accessible for individuals to connect with other individuals in their community with a simple search.
How can we ensure people are well informed with local community activities in the most concise way possible?
Creating a posting forum for planned events that hosting parties are trying to hold
Google map integrated API as a visual representation of what events are happening within user determined reasonable distance.
What it does
Our project is that it provides a place to inform people better about what events will soon happen, encouraging social gatherings to overcome a previously uninformed challenge as a group.
How we built it
We built our full stack modeling a MERN approach, however, being that this is our first hackathon and we are complete rookies who don't know how to use or make a full stack app all that well, we skipped over the R in MERN, so we took a MEN full-stack approach. MongoDB, for a database storing information such as user event inputs, bootstrap, and js for the frontend, integration of Google Maps and geocode APIs for graphic display of events happening within a user input distance.
Challenges we ran into and how we solved them
API: Being that we are still a novice in software development and API integration, an unexpected increase in time for production concerning Google maps and Geocode libraries to display an updating marker for input location and sized circle in which the user is willing to explore. Countless trials and countless errors led to the resulting HTML file in which the information concerning the google API integration is now held.
MongoDB: rendering the data onto the homepage.
JS: integrating the google maps API into the full stack. Specifically with adding multiple events to the map.
HTML5/CSS3: Challenges faced include: Creating an esthetic scheme for the UI and front page, merging JS files, and other contributions made by my teammates into eh home page for the project.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Complete integration of a full stack system, we were able to integrate Google maps geocode API services onto and into the website. We completed what we intended to and achieved our goals as outlined in our original plan.
What we learned
We learned how to use and code APIs, maintain and manage databases, javascript integration to the front end, properly use GIT, and the ability to work as a group and team of software engineers to create something functional.
What's next for Minerva
Minerva is still in its beginning stage, being restricted for time we were not able to install everything you would want from this kind of website, we plan to continue to build and include a login system with a confirmation system to prevent bot login. We also would like to change some of the graphics used for the markers on the map. End of the day, we started with nothing but hopes and ideas, and we were actually able to turn it into a full stack, so we are happy with what we have made.
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