Thirsty

Find nearest water refill stations on a convenient map
Rate and review refill stations
Sort water refill stations by building and rating in a convenient list

Inspiration

Water bottles.

What it does

Our mobile application encourages people to avoid plastic bottles and reduce plastic waste by helping them find refillable water stations. The app shows local refill stations on an easy-to-navigate map view and secondary list view that can be sorted by building or rating. Additionally, users can leave reviews on refill stations by leaving a rating and description on the water fountain's cleanliness, water temperature, taste, etc.

How we built it

We built the mobile application using Flutter and Dart for the user interface, and utilized Google Firebase for mass-data storage and user authentication.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into some initial challenges with getting the user-login-and-authentication pipeline setup with Firebase since this was our backend developers' first time using Firebase instead of a database server.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our user interface that we were able to quickly build with Flutter. Additionally, we were proud of our utilization of Google Cloud Platform's serverless web services, which helped reduce our development time.

What we learned

We enjoyed learning about Google Firebase for storing and managing our data, as well as handling our user authentication. Additionally, we got good experience developing user interfaces in Flutter.

What's next for Thirsty

Thirsty aims to quench more thirst, worldwide. We will expand our target demographics by making it easier for colleges and other organizations to import their bottle refill stations' data in bulk. Additionally, we will implement geo-hashing and caching techniques for improving the scalability of our logic with much larger data.