Rainbow Restroom

Rainbow Restroom is here to help people with disabilities, women, and non-binary individuals. It helps to find the nearest accessible, gender-neutral restroom, and menstrual products station.

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💡 Inspiration

Gender-Neutral restroom perspective 🚽

We are born in Asian countries where non-binary individuals and people from the LGBTQ+ community have limited restroom choices, they will need to think about which room is suitable for either themselves or the community. We appreciate how gender-neutral restrooms are normalized in the US, which means there are more space and privacy for everyone regardless of their gender identity and representation. Therefore, we build Rainbow Restroom for many purposes. On the one hand, we want to help students on college campuses to find restroom locations that are convenient for them. On the other hand, by building this website we hope to push for more gender-neutral restrooms everywhere, so that people of all genders could feel safe in their everyday lives.

Menstrual Supplies 🩸

As female students, we understand the need for menstrual supplies around campus because it would be a painful experience if we don't have access to menstrual products when we need them. Hence, we decided to include in our website a way to help students find restrooms with free menstrual supplies on their campus. Our purpose is to alleviate menstrual poverty and create an ecosystem where students who menstruate don't have to worry about access to menstrual products - where they get help and help other people nearby through the donate function.

People with disabilities 🦽

There is a good sign that almost all campuses have an accessible entrance where people with disabilities can easily go inside the building. To build a stronger community, we help the universities to inform people with accessible entrances to make their life more convenient.

⚙️ What it does

Rainbow Restroom is a website that lets students living on campus to find the nearest restroom on their campus including those with and without menstrual products. To make the user experience better, we also let students rate and comment on the condition of the restroom. By doing this, we are not only tracking the cleanliness, but we are also letting people from the non-binary community find their Safe Zone, where they can receive the respect of nearby people. Track and update the availability of menstrual supplies, and donate menstrual products to the location.

💻 Features

➡️ 🚽 Find Gender-neutral Restrooms near you.

➡️ 📍 Find a location with menstrual supplies.

➡️ 📍 Find a location with an accessible entrance.

➡️ 📝 Submit a new restroom to our database.

➡️ 🩸 Donate menstrual supplies.

➡️ ⭐ Rating and Review system for restrooms.

An overview of the functions of the website is as below:

1. Search and find restrooms filtered by campus. In this hackathon, we are focusing on 2 universities campuses ( DePauw University and Tufts University )

2. Search and find a location with menstrual supplies - filter campus which menstrual products are available (pads, tampons, cups, lines, etc).

3. Search and find accessible entrances for people with disabilities filtered by campus

4. Submit a restroom, let students report a new location, and updated it to the map after checking. ( This can do either by form or by chatbot)

5. Rating System, let students rate and comment on the restroom to give other users an overview of the restroom before using.

6. Donate system, let other people nearby donate the menstrual products to the restroom to help other individuals who menstruate.

🔧 How we built it

  • We designed a website using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and Bootstrap.

  • We had also applied Google Cloud to create a chatbot using Dialogflow that allows users to chat with the system to report a new restroom on campus. The data received from the user will be stored in the database in realtime.

  • We used Google Maps API to customize the campus's map and pin the location that is useful for the users.

🤖 How we used Google Cloud in our project?

We applied Google Cloud to create a chatbot using Dialogflow that allows users to chat with the system to report a new restroom on campus. The data received from the user will be stored in the database in real time.

Challenges we ran into 🙁

Brainstorming: Since the topic of gender neutrality is popular, it takes our team a while to develop a website that is unique and had a real societal influence.

Building: It is also a challenging Hackathon that we need to work in new areas which we were unfamiliar with, such as handling databases, making and customizing maps, and applying Google Cloud to the website to build a good project. Handling both backend and frontend at the same time within a weekend is also a big challenge for us.

Other: Members of the team are also at a different timezone, so we also need to come up with a schedule and responsibility that works for all timezone.

Accomplishments that we're proud of 😇

We're proud of successfully making a product that had both a front and back end. This is not our first hackathon, but this is our first time working together as 3 women in a team and building a website with multiple applications that we are passionate about. This was a very good experience for us, working remotely regardless of the timezone and effectively communicating to come up with a complete product.

What we learned 🤔

During the hackathon time span, we have learned various new tech stacks such as Google Cloud DialogFlow chatbots, Google Maps API for our map customization, website deployment using Github Pages as well as learned how to collaborate on GitHub. Last but not least we understood the meaning of team collaboration.

🚀 How we have used Github in our project? 🚀

We used Github in different ways:

Pull Requests and Issues: We created pull requests on our GitHub repository as we were a team of three and we're working on our local repository. If any of our team members gets an idea for a new feature, she would suggest it for all members to see and receive their opinions on how to implement it.

Github Branches Github branches helped a lot for beta testing of updated code before merging the new code into the original code. Our team approximately created 4-5 branches during the hackathon.

Github Pages we deployed our website at https://akshitagupta15june.github.io/Rainbow-RestRoom/ using Github pages. It was really simple to deploy our site through GitHub pages and we are planning to use this feature in future hackathons.

Github Templates We used the Github default LICENSE template for adding an MIT license to our project.

Github Actions Although implementing the actions was a kind of hectic task for our team but we tried to implement them for our pull requests. We still had to learn about GitHub's actions for future hackathons.

📲 What's next for Rainbow Restroom 📲

➡️ We will try to add more university campuses to our database.

➡️ Our team will not only target college campuses but also cities on the East Coast.

➡️ We will work on our website to improve its UI/UX.

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