StormSafe (subject to change)

Inspiration:

Our project was mostly inspired by the victims of the hurricanes Helene and Milton who still need to recover from the aftermath of those storms.

We also heard the stories of the hurricane shelters and the health of the people. This led to our decision to focus our project on that.

So, our project aims to bring help and support to the people before the hurricane hits and provides resources for during and after the disaster. We also aim to bring voice to their experience in the shelters to increase their availability and quality.

What it does:

Florida Hurricane Relief Hub:

This website gives data regarding the shelters and sorts them by location if needed. It can also sort through search filters.

This website also has data and links for helping people after the hurricane through helping and reporting guides. It also has mental health resources.

Finally, it leads to our app and survey website.

Hurricane Shelter Experience:

A web-based survey that asks participants about how they feel about the quality and experiences they have at a storm shelter.

Most questions ask the participant to rank different aspects of the storm shelter from a scale from 1 to 5, 1 being the lowest and 5 being the highest.

The survey can be accessed from the Florida Hurricane Relief Hub and StormSafe.

StormSafe:

A web application that serves as a portal to various storm shelters located in Central and Southwest Florida.

Visitors can find the nearest shelter, sort them by certain accommodations, or search for them.

Clicking on a shelter gives information about the capacity, whether pets can be brought in, and if it is a special needs shelter. Visitors can write a review of the selected shelter and can be redirected to the Hurricane Shelter Experience survey.

How we built it:

The Florida Hurricane Relief Hub is a website built with HTML and Python via the Flask plugin. Gemini was used to generate some of the site’s functionality. A GitHub repository was used to store the site’s code. The site would be hosted and deployed through Render using the code from GitHub.

The Hurricane Shelter Experience was a web-based survey using code partially generated by Gemini. The site was built using HTML and CSS. Like the Florida Hurricane Relief Hub website, a GitHub repository with its code was created. Render was also used to host and deploy the survey.

The StormSafe app was generated using Gemini through Google AI Studio. The model produced a functional HTML page with various functions written in TypeScript and styled with CSS. Some additional code had to be written and/or modified to incorporate elements that were not generated by Gemini.

Challenges we ran into:

The first challenge we faced was that there were so many ideas, so we discussed as a group and came up with a solution that was unique and fit into our capabilities - and still left room for us to learn and grow.

On the more technical side, we faced a challenge in figuring out setting up and working with virtual environments and AI agents. With time (and lots of searching) we finally understood them and built a successful working project.

There was also the challenge of maintaining what we built - adding and removing features mainly while also making sure not to remove anything else. This debugging also gave us a unique experience.

Lastly, one of our final challenges was linking our projects. We have built an app and two websites. So, the main challenge was how and where would each be linked. In the last hours, we made sure that the links worked and removed any overlooked bug.

A few aspects of the StormSafe app were limited by what Gemini could output through the prompts. This meant that further prompts had to be made, or original code had to be written to implement certain aspects of the app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of:

We figured out how to appropriately work with GitHub and Render.

We learned how to give accurate and precise commands to the AI agents to get the results we needed.

We linked all our projects together.

What we learned:

How to give proper commands to the AI agents.

How to use GitHub and Render

How to make websites and applications

How to link resources (and finding the credible ones)

What's next for StormSafe (subject to change):

Our next plan for it is to include more surveys that would allow people to share their opinion on a specific topic (infrastructure, meatal health, etc.).

Refine the websites into something that is easy to access.

Include additional languages other than English.