PreSafe

Inspiration

Recently, one of us had a violent threat at their school - a suspected school shooter. This close to home experience shone light on how real the issue of gun violence in American schools is; this is a fear that teens across the nation face everyday. The approach to student safety and shooting prevention/preparation is in need of a dire change.

What it does

PreSafe aims to prevent shootings before they ever begin - students can report suspicious activity or threatening behaviors they encounter both in the real world and online, students can upload photos of said suspicious behavior and name the perpetrator so dangerous situations can be avoided. As well as this, PreSafe provides students with preparation and resources in the event of shooting. PreSafe stores maps of each floor of your school - allowing a student to find the room or exit they are closest to. LockDown drill protocols/procedures are also included to avoid confusion and avoid potentially life threatening mistakes.

How we built it

After struggling with react native and linux for a while and downloading every software known to man, we tried something slightly more feasible. Someone suggested that we use ionic because it was "more user friendly" but then we attended the app development workshop and decided to use Xcode with Swift instead. We used Python flask to connect the motor to the app.

Challenges we ran into

We wanted to include a hardware aspect that would alert students of the threat silently, to avoid further chaos. We tried to create an LED Alarm that would blink on command using a Dragon board with a restful python API to connect it to the app. This was unsuccessful despite our six hours of traffic back and forth from the hardware table. After a lot of difficulty with the Dragon board we then tried to use an Arduino device with Python and it worked, the LED did not work as well as we wanted it to, so we changed it to a little motor that raises a cautionary flag when called.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our final product is cohesive, fairly aesthetically pleasing with a simple logo and app icon. As well as this, having begun with an HTML website and only beginning this final app idea at midnight - we did not expect to have come this far.

What we learned

The basics of making an app: How to use XCode, coding in Swift, We also learnt the basics of hardware and API We also learnt python flask And most importantly this taught us how to actually start a project and get the framework up and functioning, prior to this none of us knew how to actually make and start a project.