The Tide Turner

• 

  Main Menu

Inspiration

The theme of sustainability and the ocean made me think about a program that could help make the oceans cleaner.

What it does

The Tide Turner is an informational and interactive map of California that displays a few of its beaches. The user can click on location markers that mark these beaches and find out the average pounds of trash that's cleaned up there per year, which organization is responsible for cleaning that beach, and the organization's cleaning schedule and contact information. Then the user can simply tap anywhere to return to the map of California.

How I built it

I used Unity and objects within Unity to make a "game" which is really just an interactive map. The location markers for the beaches use scripts written in C# to display the information to the user.

Challenges I ran into

As a result of being the remainder of the team building workshop this morning, the biggest challenge was having to work alone as a CS10 student. Even when I searched for groups after attending the team builder, I was only able to find one group who had no intentions of actually being productive. Therefore, I decided to work alone at my first ever Hackathon. As for challenges while making The Tide Turner, I often found myself stumped on writing the script to make the map interactive. This was very discouraging considering the fact that the whole point of the program was to make an interactive map.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I feel very accomplished that I was able to produce a functioning snippet of The Tide Turner in 12 hours. I'm also proud that I was able to use Photopea to produce the most of the graphics I wanted to put into the program.

What I learned

A large portion of what I learned today was from the help of mentors. It was through them that I was able to learn the basics of Unity and making scripts in Unity. I learned much more than I could have ever expected from participating in my first Hackathon and had fun while doing it.

What's next for The Tide Turner

The Tide Turner would definitely expand past just the coast of California. Ideally, The Tide Turner would be applicable to anybody who is willing to help clean the nearest shore or even other bodies of water. In addition to providing data, The Tide Turner would also display a live feed of the quality of respective body of water so that the user can see the amount of bacteria present and see if it is safe for people.

Built With

• unity