Go Outside

Inspiration

Sitting in front of a screen for hours on end has become the new norm as the global pandemic continues to restrict social gatherings with other individuals. We noticed that people would sit in front of the screen regardless of their productivity and hence, having no work and life balance. People have said that they didn’t know what they could do or didn’t have the energy to think of an activity, so we decided to bring the activity to them. Scientists believe that interacting with nature helps ease one’s mind and also physically relax, and our web app Go Outside is here to do just that. With a carefully designed UI, we hope to engage our users in meaningful outdoor activities in different weather conditions.

What it does

As summer finally approaches, we know that there are people out there that want to go outside but is lack of new things to do. So we created Go Outside, an online platform for people to share their outdoor activity ideas to other, in return for an activity idea from others. Each user is asked to provide one idea to add to the central database, could be something that he/she has done before and enjoyed, and then he/she will get back an activity that someone else enjoys to try!

How we built it

We built the backend portion with Python and Flask (utilising its modular way of creating applications), using CockroachDB as the database. The UI was designed in figma and created in React.js.

What we learned

We've learned how to work with cockroachdb, sharpened up our skills in developing react web apps, and also how to deploy a service to Google Cloud Platform.

What's next for Go Outside

For our next step we'd like to complete the API deployment to Google Cloud Platform , and then we'll be implementing geolocation + using 3rd party weather API, tracking what kind of whether the user's area is under, in order to provide the best activity recommendations to the user.

Challenges we ran into

For the backend component with python, flask and coachroachdb, we had some issues connecting to coachroachdb to get our API working. We also decided to try to deploy the API to google cloud platform, but also had configuration issues during the process.

For the front end part, the one of the issues we ran into is CORS policy restrictions of browsers since we're sending api requests from our web app to our backend across the browser. Even after installing CORS handling packages on both the frontend and backend side we're still getting issues with it. We also had issues with time, we had to scale down the scope of our product a lot to fit it into the time frame, since we do have a couple more features that we'd like to implement. Lastly, we had a team member who had his computer die on us for about a dozen times which greatly affected development , but with our teamwork, we were able to push through.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Although time is short and we didn't get any sleep, everybody pushed through and finished the product. Each of us took on a field that we are more confident in and completed the responsibility associated with it. Teamwork makes the dream work.

What's next for Go Outside

We 'll also be implementing Firebase authentication, that way we can extend our features to tracking whether a user has complete a specific activity suggestions or not, further improve our recommendation algorithm. Ultimately, we want 'Go Outside' to be able to reach a wider audience in the pursuit of connecting people, technology and nature.