App Icon

🚀 Lost & Found

An easy-to-use app to help you keep track of items.

📌 Inspiration

People lose things all the time. This app helps you find what you're looking for by keeping track of where your items are.

The idea started as a way to help people make sure they leave a place with everything they had when they got there by sending notifications based on movement. We had a hard time figuring out the logistics for that, so we pivoted to something still centered on the core idea: helping people keep track of their things.

A couple of our teammates are from Nepal and mentioned how many grocery stores are disorganized, and it often takes a long time for employees to find items in storage. This app could be a solution to that problem. It’s designed to be especially useful for long-term storage — like tools, craft supplies, or electronics you might not use often but need to find quickly when the time comes.

🔍 What it does

Takes in an item name and location and stores them as a dictionary in Firebase
Searches through the dictionary to retrieve the information to display
If several items have the same name, all of the locations that have that item are shown
The user can delete items from the list

⚙️ How we built it

Frontend: We built the app using React Native, with help from ChatGPT prompt engineering to quickly generate the layout. The app collects item and location data from the user and displays it cleanly through a simple UI. Backend: For the backend, we used Firebase to store items in a real-time database and retrieve them as needed. The Firebase integration was handled through Flask, which connected the frontend to the database. Although it took a while, the development went smoothly thanks to prior Python experience.

💪 Challenges

One of our biggest early challenges was changing ideas several hours in. Our original concept required using APIs, which none of us were familiar with. Also, this was our first hackathon, so we didn't have any prior experience to take inspiration from. Even with the easier project, we had a lot to learn. None of us had used Firebase or React Native before, so setting up all parts of our project involved a learning curve.

With less than 48 hours to complete everything, we divided the work by focus area, one person handled the backend, one tackled the frontend, and one hopped between both, which helped us move quickly despite the challenges.

🌟 Accomplishments

This was our team’s first hackathon, and we’re proud of how much we accomplished in such a short time. One of our biggest wins was getting a functioning app up and running, especially considering the fact that we were learning new tools as we went along. What really stands out is that the app looks and functions like a real product you might find in an app store.

📚 What we learned

This hackathon was an amazing learning experience for all of us. We gained hands-on experience with React Native and Firebase, both of which we’d never used before. Navigating through the learning curve of these technologies was challenging but rewarding.

We also learned a lot about collaboration under tight deadlines. We had little experience working together on anything, little experience coding in teams, and no experience creating and completing projects. With less than 48 hours, we had to divide and conquer: while one person focused on backend development, another tackled the UI, and the third did both. This experience helped us better understand teamwork and project management.

🛠️ Future Development

Favorites - Given more time, we would have loved to make an option to favorite items or sort items by date or location
Allow pictures - One aspect of the original pitch of this project was the ability to take a picture of the item so that you can see where it is in a space. It got cut when we started cutting unnecessary features, prioritizing getting a product up and running. It would be cool to try to implement this later.
Accounts and log in - In the real world, this kind of app would need a login system so that people can access their previous items.