Snap Help

Snap Help is an innovative web app that builds a community online between those at home, stores, hospitals, and medical professionals that lets you stay safe, stay indoors, and let us handle the rest.

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Snap Help (COVID-19 Global Hackathon Submission)

Our Team

Our team consists of Sam Assareymuriyil (captain), Ayush Vora, Mahtab Mann, and Jaimil Dalwadi. We are a team of high-school students located in Brampton, Ontario, Canada, who came together (online, not in real life, obviously) to help out and contribute whatever we can during these confusing times of need. Sam is a coder with experience in Artificial Intelligence. He is also the founder and president of North Park Secondary School's Hack Club, named Viking Hacks. Ayush is a Machine Learning and Neural Networking enthusiast. He is also the Co-founder and Co-President of Viking Hacks. Jaimil is also a Co-Founder and Co-President of Viking Hacks. He is a member of our school's DECA Team, advancing it to the International Career Development Conference. Mahtab is the Captain of North Park Secondary School's VEX Robotics team, 99000X, qualifying for VEX Robotics Worlds Championship 2020. With our member’s wide areas of expertise, we know we will work together whilst looking from a variety of viewpoints.

Inspiration

We wanted to help out the community and businesses during these times of need as much as we could. We decided that the best way to do so is to use our skills to good use and make an application that everyone can use. Then we thought, why have an application that can only serve one function? We thought of a variety of features that a socially isolated person would need. We came up with the following: a way to get food safely, a way to make sure they are healthy, a way to see the latest information about the Coronavirus, and a way to keep themselves entertained at home.

Description - What it Does

Snap Help is a web application designed to help keep everyone indoors as much as possible to avoid the spread of the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19), or Coronavirus for short. The web application helps people complete chores, such as groceries, from the comfort of their home. It also shows statistics about the Coronavirus in your country, as well as what the nearest hospitals/medical centers are to you.

Parts of the Web App

Home Page:

The first page that you should see when you open Snap Help. It gives general information about the website and what features the website provides.

Me Page:

The section that the user can fill out information about themselves. We use this information to help personalize the other aspects of the website.

Groceries Page:

The page where the user can purchase groceries from the comfort of their home. It is very easy to use, and allows anyone to stay safe from home using our personalized database.

Health Page:

There are 3 parts to this page. The first is a tracker of Coronavirus cases, recoveries, and deaths in your country. It also provides a self-checkup for anyone to check symptoms they may have. Depending on their symptoms, the website will tell the user if they should go and professionally get checked up by a doctor. The last section shows the nearest hospital to your location (the location is received from the input in the Me page). Currently, this section is most optimized for the following cities:

  • Toronto
  • Vancouver
  • New York
  • Los Angeles
  • San Francisco
  • Chicago
  • Phoenix
  • Seattle
  • Vancouver
  • Miami
  • Houston

However, it will work to an acceptable degree every other city in the US and Canada as well.

Hospital Page:

Currently, we have a database with 50 hospitals in the aforementioned cities. However, we are looking to expand our searches to as many hospitals as possible. On this page, doctors can fill our information about themselves and their hospital. After we verify them, we contact them back and give the hospital access to edit our hospital database. This will help us optimize our Health page.

Help Page:

This page contains instructions on how to use each page.

Memes Page:

When you are bored, you can go and visit some dank memes.

The Tracks

Community

The primary goal of Snap Help is to keep everyone indoors. This will promote social distancing and social isolation. By providing features that allow the consumer to stay inside, we can minimize their need to go outdoors, keeping them safe.

Business

One feature of the web application is allowing consumers to order groceries from home at any time. This allows businesses, such as grocery stores, to continue running without any physical customers visiting them. This allows all food service businesses to stay open, even those without their own dedicated delivery app. Businesses that may otherwise be shut down will now continue to run.

How we Built It

  1. Create a GitHub repository.
  2. Download the Live Share extension on VS Code so everyone can edit it.
  3. Use Bootstrap Studio to make the website look nice and professional.
  4. Use JavaScript to implement logic, APIs, and Databases into the website.
  5. Make sure everything works as it should.

Challenges and Overcoming Them

Three of the main challenges we overcame were learning how to use APIs, databases, and search engines. All of us are quite new to JavaScript in the first place, so it was a challenge for us to implement these features into our program. It was the first time that any of us used these, so it was quite difficult starting off. We overcame these challenges by splitting up the work, and researching one concept on our own. Sam and Ayush worked on learning APIs and Databases, while Mahtab and Jaimil focused on search engines. Eventually, with research, practice, and experimentation, we all got our parts to work.

Accomplishments and Learning Experiences

Throughout this hackathon, we all learnt many different skills that will stick with us throughout our careers and our lives. These skills include programming skills and social skills. Throughout this project, we learnt about how we can use JavaScript to implement APIs, Databases, and other logic functions. We also implemented social skills (while staying socially isolated ;) ) by working together as a team to accomplish this goal. We learnt how to best split up work in a way to take advantage of everyone's individual skills.

Conclusion

Next Steps

This project is not fully complete, but we can later improve it as we become more adept with programming and development. This is why we need more help in finalizing this website. Some new features that we need to still fully implement is to make the payment method work to allow the customers to actually purchase the groceries. Currently, the groceries section is still just a prototype. We also plan to implement a method so that our team is able to view the responses that the doctors who give us information about their hospitals send. This way, we would actually be able to contact the hospitals and give them more information to fill in our database. As our database fills up, our health page would become even more accurate.

Final Words

Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success. - Henry Ford

Overall, we are all still very proud of what we have managed to accomplish in this short amount of time. This project has allowed us all to learn new things and collaborate together. It also allowed us to work together on a project, bringing us together at a time where we would normally be sitting at home wasting our time. With an ongoing crisis, we have put forth our efforts to ease the minds of the public through this extremely convenient web app.

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