Inspiration:
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, most people are isolated at home and may need the motivation to try out a new individual sport. As a result, we believe that people would want to try and improve their ice skating skills. We also believe that people can be motivated to ice skate more frequently by comparing their progress with friends and with learners around the world. Ice skating will become easier since it will be practised more, hence our application name, 'Skatezy' ("Skate-easy").
What it does:
After signing up, our application would first help users to find their nearest skating rink or help them discover ice skating rinks available near them. Our application can also record their training details and statistics for each training session. For example, users can record their training date, distance skated, time spent skating, and videos of their training to motivate others to improve their ice skating skills. Furthermore, users can form their own team and compare their training statistics with teams around the world.
How we built it:
We built Skatezy using the Pythonic framework -Flask. We utilized Radar's API to obtain the user's IP address and subsequently, their nearest ice skating rink (through coordinates). In terms of allowing users to not only record their training but also register their team, we used Flask-WTF forms and Google OAuth's API. Above all, we coded this service through Repl.it.
Challenges we ran into:
We ran into challenges obtaining and implementing the data from the Radar API. We also ran into problems implementing the JavaScript of ‘Google Oauth’ with our project so that a user could be identified and logged onto our database.
Accomplishments that we're proud of:
Our team of beginner coders are proud of using the Flask framework and working with APIs from Radar.io. Both of these are unfamiliar to us and it is rewarding for us to be able to learn and implement these in Skatezy. We also felt like we became better problem solvers with us being able to tackle unforeseen issues such as dealing with peculiar data structures.
What we learned:
As a team of students from different parts of the world, we did not know each other; we quickly learned how to communicate and work efficiently as a team. We also learned how to overcome problems by helping each other find resources and by contributing our technical skills. Moreover, we learnt that our idea (Skatezy) has the potential to make a difference in the world as it was an idea that we were all passionate about.
What's next for Skatezy
Skatezy has both short term and long term goals:
- Short term goals:
- We plan to display users' preferred ice skating rink on a map -by geofencing- to help them locate an appropriate rink and see where their team members are, in relation to the rink.
- Our application also plans to record the total statistics for the whole team and have those compared to other teams around the world. The better the statistics are, compared to others, the more virtual medals/awards teams can earn, which could be a source of motivation. This source of motivation would be hopefully emphasised through a coaching system (looks at what other teams are doing to rise up the ranks and recommends it to the team).
- Lastly, we hope to incorporate a notification system so that users are aware of when they have been put onto a training team.
- Long term goals:
- Skatezy is currently a web application however Skatezy would need to be converted to a mobile application in order to be more effective.
- Skatezy also focuses on motivating people to learn how to ice skate (10 million ice skated in 2017). However, we would like Skatezy to expand to other sports that people would like to improve on.
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