Inspiration
I love travelling and meeting new people! Sadly, these are things I haven't been able to do anymore because of quarantine. Since the pandemic started, it has become easier to feel alone and disconnected. The world has become more divided due to all the discord and troubles this pandemic has caused. This is why I decided to create World Tour--in the hopes of allowing its users to connect with other people and appreciate various cultures from all over the world!
What it does
Before anything, please note that the whole experience using the app will be virtual. The "flights", "tours", and all other activities to be mentioned in the app are all virtual.
✔️ The app allows its users to virtually travel anytime and anywhere. You can visit different **destinations** and participate in various **events**. Doing so will earn you **points**.
✔️ Users can also **connect** with people from all over the world. You can either give tourists a virtual tour of your home country, or you can connect with locals from the country you're visiting! Connecting with people will earn you **hearts**. The number of hearts a user has will be one of the first things that a prospective tour guide or tourist will look at when they're considering connecting with you.
✔️ Users can also **contribute** to their respective countries' travel pages by adding pictures or additional information on different destinations and events or by editing already-existing information. This feature allows the app to be a lot more dynamic.
✔️ In order to incentivize the users to do these activities, users can earn **badges** (apart from hearts and points) in doing so.
How I built it
I first created a prototype for the app using Figma. Then, I coded it using Apache Netbeans (Java) for the app's features, functions, and scene navigation. I also used JavaFX Scene Builder for the UI/UX design. For the demo, I used the Figma prototype as the JavaFX application still lacks some information (and therefore functionality) since the app doesn't have users yet 😅
Challenges we ran into
I consider myself to be more of a front-end developer rather than back-end, which is why it was a challenge to work solo for a hackathon where I had to work full-stack.
I also ran into a technical problem wherein my laptop would randomly crash in the middle of my work as it had too much to process. This required me to hit Ctrl+S every 5 minutes, but the process of saving in itself took a while for my laptop as well (depending on how much work I had done).
Also, something that took a lot more time than I expected was doing research on the different information presented in the app. I was hoping to have spent more time actually coding and polishing my prototype, but researching took up more time than I thought.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
This is my second solo hackathon! Despite having limited experience, a short amount of time, and some technical difficulties, I'm proud of what I've been able to come up with. More specifically, though, I'm proud of how I managed to make the UX more dynamic by making some features more interactive, such as the spinning globe and some scrollable sections.
What we learned
I got a good refresher on programming with Java. This is also my first time creating a Figma prototype first before coding the app itself with Netbeans. Just a month ago, I didn't even know of Figma's existence, which is why I had a really hard time working on the UI/UX of my first project directly in JavaFX Scene Builder. Using Figma, I got to focus more on the app's UI/UX design, and therefore gained a lot more skills in this aspect, which has allowed me to create more interactive features which I've previously mentioned. In my first hackathon, the project I created was incredibly static! I would say that World Tour is definitely an improvement for me.
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