Inspiration

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children finds that 98% of long term missing children cases involve children who run away or were abducted by a family member, and only 3,147 children were recovered after 6 months. Too many children go missing, and there is a paradoxically low amount of awareness about this major issue that happens every day. We were looking for a way to find trends in datasets to help predict future cases and raise safety to prevent the root cause.

What it does

Our goal is to ensure that the children in our community are allowed a childhood. We want to help caretakers take safe steps toward keeping their little ones safe and protected. We aim to do this by employing real time tracking for children 17 and under and implementing a variety of features that can help parents discern dangerous situations from safe ones.

Tools:

Front End: React.js served as a robust framework to bring our HTML, CSS, and Javascript together and build a functional, efficient interface that any adult can use. Cloudflare AI: We found online data for crime statistics and dropout rates for each county in Georgia and used Cloudflare to process it into a heat map that shows biggest risk areas and can help caretakers assess child safety. Auth0: Login and authorization process was entirely managed by Auth0, which allows us to manage user identity and helps to keep user data safe and persistently stored

How we built it

By leveraging ECL and Cloudflare AI to analyze data, React.js to build the web app, and Figma to make the hypothetical app, the system we created is designed to keep children throughout our community of Georgia safe and ease parent's minds. We can also build awareness for unsafe areas that create dangerous situations for families. We understand that our voices and opinions can be valuable in persuading the allocation of resources to improve efforts for our community.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into several issues with connecting to the cluster and had hiccups with the IDE that we were supposed to use. Additionally, there was a lot of incompatibility with databases and our computer OSes which limited our ability to work on the backend of the web app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to power through the several issues we ran into as a team. Any one of us were able to call for help from each other without hesitation and receive valuable feedback/suggestions that allowed us to work through anything that was challenging us. The freedom we each allowed each other to work at our own pace and also choose our tasks also cemented the mutual respect we had for one another. Overall, we started this

What we learned

The majority of our group was unfamiliar with Figma. Following quickstart guides and intuition allowed us to make progress very quickly and design an app that we are proud of. We also gained crucial experience in the fundamentals of fullstack development including frameworks such as express, node, and react. While we did not use all three of them, we did attempt to learn as much about them as possible.

What's next for Safe Steps

Moving forward, we need to build the app into a cross platform mobile application that can utilize real time geolocation tracking on a phone, as well as to properly implement the alert system with push notifications. We plan on improving the website as well to generally bring it up to par with our app designs. We want to address many of the shortcomings that may have arisen due to time constraints and stress that may include any unpolished or unresponsive features.