Inspiration
As someone who has always looked for ways to contribute to the ongoing efforts of climate change, I learned about citizen scientists. The importance of them allows for the production of rapid and precise information sets that researchers and scientists can analyze for trends. This not only allows researchers to cover more areas with precision but also eliminates the tedious manual measurements that take away from more meaningful tasks. Native Universe is a play on the words of citizen scientists, as we emphasize their importance.
What it does
Native Universe is an account-based application. After the user is signed in, there is an onboarding screen where users will learn to set up a water-measuring gauge. The home screen is where the user will enter the measured amount of precipitation along with their location. After they choose the intensity of the precipitation amount ranging from low, medium, and high and click save, the map view will get populated with markers that show the area and its amount of precipitation. When there are more users and data values, researchers will utilize this to understand the effects of climate change better.
How we built it
This app is built in Xcode using Swift. The login authentication system is built using Google Firebase. The Map View is generated using MapKit from Apple.
Challenges we ran into
The most notable challenge that we ran into was parsing data into the map view with the user-entered values.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of being able to put together a visually appealing MVP for Citizen Scientists to log precipitation in their area.
What we learned
While working on this project we learned that under short time circumstances, we should aim to lay out the features well in comparison to building as we went along.
What's next for Native Universe
Native Universe has good potential to be released to the public. The first step afterward is to implement a database system like Google Firestore where all the measurements can be stored. I would also implement Google Maps and utilize heat mapping features so high-precipitation and low-precipitation areas can be identified with ease.
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