Inspiration
Our inspiration was that one of my friends had a guy break into his car and steal his stuff. We understood how big of an issue crime is in a community and decided to try and solve it.
What it does
Crime Stoppers is an interactive website that encourages members to collectively join together and inform others of certain crimes going on around the world. Users can add the type of crime, a description of what happened, and how much this crime puts the community in danger. This can increase awareness of certain crimes in certain communities, leading to more people knowing what type of crime and a description of the crime going on in their area.
How we built it
We built this using 3 languages. Python, JavaScript, and HTML. We used the Python framework Flask to create our website and a Python framework called Folium to create the map. We used HTML for the front end and JavaScript for the connection to the back end.
Challenges we ran into
We had some small problems with this one. Firstly when we tried to add the markers to the map itself it led to some errors. Yet we were able to fix it by figuring out how to access the database in HTML and then figuring out how to access HTML in Python. The next problem was choropleth. When we were making the form to add a new crime to the map we wanted to make it easier for the user to add a marker. To do this we decided to color the map red so the user would understand they need to add a marker to the map. Coloring the map required us to find a website that would let us do that and then we would have to download it and then finally implement it in the code. To keep it simple. Everything had a problem. We had more problems than I could count. Our code was like a donut. The outside looked great but in actuality, we had a huge hole. The front end looks good but when we look at the code we could see only red. We just had to persevere and keep trying until it worked.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are all really proud that we managed to stay awake all night. But in actuality, we are all proud of how much we were able to accomplish on this day. We are proud that we could come up with a great idea and actually were able to create a website that looks and works.
What we learned
We learned a lot about not only coding but also teamwork. In the beginning, we had to pool our ideas and resources to create a list of ideas that would actually be useful for a community. On the coding side of things, we learned a lot about how to look at methods and APIs as well as make sure that the code is readable.
What's next for Crime Stoppers
Our next steps would include using APIs to find real-time crime data so that we can inform more people about the crimes being committed in their community. We would also want to add a filter that could help people sort crimes into high-alert crimes or into certain crimes such as theft.
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