No Weenies : DP Map

Discovery Park is a navigational challenge upon first entry. Our website takes no weenies, and helps students and professors find exactly what they are looking for!

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Inspiration

We weren't sure what to develop at first. We sat down at our table, laid out our "No Weenies Allowed" decoration from SpongeBob, and loaded up a Minecraft Realm to brainstorm. Suddenly, our friend asked us where room D201 was and how to get there. We immediately knew we had to make a map.

What it does

No Weenies plots the shortest path between locations at Discovery Park! Simply enter your current location, and a room you wish to get to, and a helpful map will appear in front of you. It can even navigate up stairs and elevators! Also, No Weenies allows you to immediately plot your entire schedule at once. Enter your class schedule in chronological order, and the map will show you how to travel between your classrooms.

How we built it

Building this map was not easy. We implemented a custom data structure and algorithm and made it fast enough for results to appear immediately. We also walked the entire Discovery Park campus ourselves to ensure the most accurate pathing. We didn't just map classrooms, we mapped every single room in discovery park that we could physically get to the entrance of. This means we had to manually catalogue over 700 nodes, which took hours of typing and adjustment. We also weren't sure how to design our website at first either, so we decided to stay true to our theme and use SpongeBob colors.

Challenges we ran into

One of the challenges we ran into was implementing a canvas for SVG files in html. Through trial and error, we didn't give up, and eventually produced sleek looking paths on our map!

However, the biggest challenge by far was plotting the map details themselves. Not sure if we're looking in the wrong place, but the most prevalent and professional map we could find on the internet still had a lot of mistakes. We walked around with a laptop in hand and took care to make edits as needed, adjusting walls and adding missing rooms. We almost got lost once or twice, and found a racecar somewhere deep in the F block, but the adventure certainly paid off!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really proud of ourselves for making a project we originally thought we wouldn't be able to make. We arrived at the hackathon with another team member and they couldn't get in, but we held their spirit in our hearts and persevered. About halfway through plotting the coordinates, we thought we were in over our heads, especially with only two team members. We considered adjusting our plans a little, but decided to keep going and see what our final product could turn into.

What we learned

We learned how to use HTML Canvas and learned more about Fetch API.

What's next for No Weenies : DP Map

We'd love to add more functionality. First, while our website operates just fine on mobile devices, we'd like to polish the experience even further. We also need to finish implementing our "nearest bathroom" search. Furthermore, a "search by class" or "search by professor" function would be helpful if students don't remember exact room numbers. We'd also like to incorporate location sensing so the user doesn't have to know their exact whereabouts to get an accurate path. Finally, although a niche solution, we'd like to try developing a plugin to automatically extract node data and labels from Inkscape. With this resource, one could theoretically map anywhere with ease, and never have to manually plot coordinates again.

We're so glad we kept working on this project, and are super happy with the results! We hope you toon in to noweenies.club next semester to map out your class schedule!

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