Helping Hands

Logo

Inspiration

Natural disasters are a very frightening problem that requires short-term and long-term solutions. Recently, Texas suffered from Hurricane Harvey, so we were inspired to create a mobile application to create a community for people that need financial support as well as clothing, food, and toiletries donations. In fact, during Hurricane Harvey, one of our team member's dad went out for disaster relief and support, so we wanted to make it easier for others to contribute.

What it does

Our application is designed for the community to come together through charitable and awareness events regarding natural disasters. Users can create an account, upload an event for a clothing, food, toiletries, or misc. related event that includes the name, description, date, time, and location. Our algorithm then sorts this data by categories and sends it to the different pages. Then, people can select a category to find events and contribute towards the cause.

How we built it

Initially, we wanted to create a web-application using React, but then we thought that it would be fun to learn app development so we experimented with android studio. We coded the back-end in Java and ran the code in the android studio. We also used Procreate to design the logo.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges we faced were inputting the users input from the app into the correct pages that go for each category. This problem was specific to android studio since it converted the strings into bytes.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the fact that since this was all of our first hackathon, we had little experience with creating mobile applications, but we ended up learning a lot over the hours we were here. We are also proud of creating an app that is about something we are passionate about.

What we learned

We learned how to design and plan out an idea from scratch, how to use android studio and how to build a mobile application.

What's next for Helping Hands

The next step for Helping Hands is to create a fully functioning application that can have a user create an account, upload events and categorize them into different categories. Upon further research and development, there could be a feature that would send alerts or notifications about information about the natural disaster in the user’s area as well as which roads and highways are closed. This app would allow the user to enter their location and it should eventually spread to other cities other than Houston. It will also allow the user to make a difference in their community by helping out in locations nearby to their entered address.