PARCC

A Hamilton tourism app that provides personalised activities based on location and weather.

Comment

Inspiration

We all moved to Hamilton from around Ontario, and were looking for things to do when we first started at McMaster. Unfortunately whenever we found fun activities they were often too far (for student without cars) or the weather was terrible and we were unable to attend. Hamilton Tourism cites a need for 'needs based usage' where under-utilised facilities are better advertised and then used by tourists and locals.

CHALLENGES

TD Connected Communities Challenge - Innovation Factory Challenge Defasco - Internet of Things

What it does

Our app works by providing users with a personalised list of activities based on the current weather and the location. After a user selects an activity and location, they are directed to the location via google maps.

How we built it

At first, we wanted to build something with React, because that’s what we knew as front-end developers, however we decided that a mobile app would be a better choice. We learned react native while building the front end, and included libraries to help with functionality, such as axios for reaching out to the web, and react navigation for navigating the app.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge for our project was connecting the front and back end of our project. We had difficulty using the amazon web services and getting certification for our domain.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

We learned a lot from this project. On the back end we learned how to work with Google's maps API as well as the Dark Sky and Hamilton Data APIs. On the front-end we learned about react-native and how to optimise the usage of libraries. Overcoming the challenge of connecting the front and back end together was our greatest accomplishment.

What's next for PARCC

We are looking to provide even more personalisation as we continue to develop. Using Beautiful Soup to web-scrape for current event, and to allow users to filter the activities based on interests. As we collect more data we will be able to offer a better experience to users and give tourism information to the city Hamilton.

Share this project:

Updates