inspiration : We get about 3 emails a day about students getting stabbed, robbed, sexually assaulted, or eaten by mountain lions. There’s obviously a safety issue off campus and as a woman, this hits very close to my heart. It’s a tragedy that kids come here from all around the world only to be attacked on their way home, only to tell their parents they had their 1200$ laptop stolen or even worse, to tell them that some older person just felt them up in the middle of nowhere. This project tries to touch on our approach to this issue, a start, if you will. Safety on this campus is of the worst and it needs to be discussed.
What it does: This iphone/android app is supposed to give the shortest path home, to your friends house, or wherever but taking into consideration all of the events that have happened along your route. For instance, if I’m trying to go home from campus, but there has been a stabbing on a street google maps says i must walk through as apart of my shortest route home, the app will parse the nixle report or take in user data (in case the nixle report didn’t come in) and FLAG the street the event happened on, therefore giving you a new shortest route home but avoiding that street.
How: The code for this app involved dijkstra’s algorithm + a*. We built a back end part using html and some parts using flask but mostly python. The algorithm creates a map using nodes and edges creating an undirected graph. Using object orientated programming, we allowed all of the streets to have “crime flags” which, by default are all false, and then changed when a nixle report comes in. When self.crimeFlag = True, the dijkstra will know to excluded that street when determining our route.
Challenges: Challenges included how to create a sense of undirected-ness. We didn’t want a directed graph but creating all edges individually, we implicitly did this. We also were not able to make the app itself but rather a local website version of what we kind of wanted to achieve. Another challenge was the fact that one of our teammates felt “sick” and left within an hour of working on the project, two/ remaining 3 only had some knowledge of python, but one of us was able to teach OOP while the other worked on the code.
Accomplishments: We were able to finish and have the “website” working after working on it for about 12 hours. I had never done anything on my own or worked from scratch and one of my partners had never been to a hackathon but really enjoyed coding so he was able to indulge in his element while inspiring some of the other teammates. Half of the group were also latino so it felt good to accomplish something not popularly done by latinos.
Learned: Some teammates learned how to use OOP while still taking data 8, another learned that it doesn’t matter if the project is not up to your standards, it is what you REALLY did that defines the quality of this project. I learned that I’m really going to enjoy learning how to code in different languages as I pursue a minor in CS. I learned that a lot of the skills we learned here at Cal are very much relevant and applicable. I’ve learned that being able to create all of these amazing things will take us a lot of time and nobody will know the answer right away or be correct 100% of the time but that it doesn’t matter, learning and creating something cool is a giant process.
Next?: What is next is we as students will go on trying to solve this issue. Maybe not through an app but spreading awareness and looking out for one another. This mindset has put bear walk in place, door to door, and night safety shuttle. This is still going to be a big issue here and until its subsided, we need to take steps in looking out for one another.
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