Shout Out

Home page
Map page that informs user of issues around their area (mainly Monash Clayton campus)
Page where users can report issues.
Acknowledgements page that shows a scoreboard for who contributes the most.

Inspiration

We found that at the university campus that sometimes bins were full and it was a hassle to find another bin as they tend to be scattered across the campus site. Sometimes we may not know that the restrooms might be unusable and have to go out to find a different restroom.

Would there be a quick and easy way to see the real-time status of these amenities and other significant point of areas at the university campus?

What does it do?

We decided that a real-time map where students could flag (shout out) any issues relating to commonly used areas would enable students to view an ever-changing status update on the state of the school grounds. It is purposely designed so that students can access the map of the school within a single click to immediately view the status of commonly used areas. Within this map it will show the location of the student (the app will ask for location service access) and show status icons for the areas of interest. The icon can either be a green diamond (indicating it is operational with no issues reported) or a red diamond (indicating a reported issue) to alert students whilst on the app.

The issues that could be alerted by students for students:

bins that are overflowing, or contain chemical or pose as a fire hazard,
restroom safety and hygiene issues (e.g. broken toilets, sinks, wet floors)
water fountains not operable or no hot water available
university buildings closed or doors/escalators/elevators not working

To help encourage students to contribute to 'shouting out' the alerts, there is a upvote/downvote option for reported issues and for issues that are downvoted past a chosen threshold, it will automatically be removed or may be removed by the app administrator. Students that contribute with high upvotes for their shout outs will be shown in a scoreboard page that will persist for the lifetime of the app to immortalise their contribution over the duration of their study at the school. The school administrators may decide to reward these high scoring individuals with gift cards for example, further providing an option for schools to making their grounds safer and cleaner.\n

It can also benefit the custodians of the school early on these reported issues leading to prompt response. This can save any potential accidents happening and be cost effective in risk management as it is not possible to have eyes everywhere across a large university campus. To help prevent misuse of the app and lead to more quality contributions, the 'shouting out' function requires the student to log in to report an issue. It can be possible that this app could be added as an extension to a school's app as one of its many tools.\n

How did we build it?

We are building our frontend using HTML/CSS with Bootstrap and for the backend, we are using Python, Flask and SQLAlchemy for the database.

Challenges we ran into

Initially our team consisted of 4 individuals however one was not able to attend. After re-assessing our skillsets and what technologies we wanted to learn and practice more on, we decided to revolve it around Python and technologies supplementing the web app functionality. We were browsing through potential free options for real-time GPS APIs that we could use in our project and found that it very challenging to implement. Initially we started with trying to use the Google Maps APIs however came across issues with the cost and purpose of using the service. We then decided to explore an alternative way to represent this information, such as having the user provide the geolocational coordinates (our app reads their location services data) to our app from where it will use that to connect to pinpoint the positioning of the user on the map instead.

Another challenging aspect was the 2 days required to completing and learning new technologies required for the project, however the experience we gained as a result was certainly worthwhile.

What we're proud about

More practice on Python, Flask, SQL Alchemy databases, frontend and backend tinkering, and attempting to figure out how to implement the GPS map APIs.