Inspiration
Life under a pandemic has presented an abundance of dilemmas. Within the timespan of a year, everyone's life had been restricted to the boundaries of their homes. However, the pandemic has also presented the opportunity for us, as a society, to seek out ways to redefine adventure. X Marks the Spot was designed to solve this problem by allowing users to submit local spots to an interactive website.
What it does
X Marks the Spot displays an interactive map that shows markers of local spots in an area that users have uploaded. Users are given the option to add a new location to the map in which they are required to upload an image, location name, and location description -- this location will then be displayed on the map. Currently, users can locate different areas but traversing the map.
How we built it
Our team was made up of mostly beginner developers and we began with a general idea of what we wanted to build. We used Figma to build low-fidelity prototypes of the site and began with the front-end component of our project using HTML and CSS. The backend was built with python and the Flask framework. X Marks The Spot also heavily relied on Google APIs such as the Google Maps API and the Google Autocomplete API.
Challenges we ran into
We were all first-time users of the Google APIs so it took us a while to figure out how to integrate it into our code. It was also difficult to link the database information to the frontend.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of completing our first functional hackathon project.
What we learned
Our team became familiar with the Google Maps API and how to integrate the Flask framework with a database to be displayed on a webpage. This was also our team's first hackathon and we became comfortable with source control and GitHub.
What's next for X Marks the Spot
We hope to further improve X Marks the Spot by implementing a search bar that will take the user to a specific location on the map. Another improvement our team would like to see in the future is having a user system and allowing our users to leave reviews for the spots.
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