SeeShell

SeeShells Logo

Inspiration

One of our team members’ grandparents often travels to Europe and South America. Contrary to popular custom, instead of bringing back souvenirs, they bring back seashells. To them, each seashell with its unique shape and pattern represents an experience they had. Lately, however, they’ve been struggling to store, categorize, and maintain their collection. Due to this, they’ve had to give away a lot of shells to close friends and families. Consequntly, each shell, with it’s own distinct memory, is gone. We wanted to create a digital alternative to this that could store photos online, sort seashells, and keep the memories alive.

What it does

This app helps to automatically categorize and sort seashell collections and store pictures of seashells in a public gallery, based on the beach the seashsell was found.

How we built it

We started our process by developing our aesthetic and app outline in Figma. From the start we knew that we wanted to prioritize ease of upload and categorization, leading us to develop various features we implemented in our app.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into 3 main issues with: Ruby, Scope of project, and effectively sorting data Ruby: There were compatibility and version issues beyond our control, due to download and update errors. We wasted a lot of time trying to remedy the situation. Essentially we were running into a brick wall. Scope: We were unsure where to end the scope of our project. We had a lot of great ideas but had difficulty figuring out what we really needed to have a quality project vs what we didn’t. Some things that we wanted to add but didn’t end up adding was an option to take photos of animals, aside from the seashells, an achievement system to earn xp, a friend system, and having cv automatically model/choose the model. All of these were great ideas but not practical in the given time. Effective sorting: We didn’t know how to effectively organize someone’s collection. Due to the numerous data sources we were intaking, it would be unrealistic to tackle sorting in an efficient manner.

Accomplishments that we're proud of:

We adapted well enough to the Ruby situation by cutting our losses and looked at alternative solutions to lead into the most ideal situation. We looked at SVG, Google Maps, and Apple Maps, which was implemented into our final draft. We are most proud of our teamwork. We all worked really well together and were able to divide up tasks efficiently and effectively. We had a couple hiccups but were ultimately able to work around it. Thanks to our hours of brainstorming by the Ping Pong Table, discussions over dinner, and many late night coding sessions we were able to produce SeeShells.

What we learned

We have learned a lot of things throughout the course of this hackathon. We learned how to delegate work and accomplish our tasks effectively and how to manage our time well. React Native Development and API’s are now second nature to us as our whole project revolved around their integration.

What's next for SeeShells

We definitely want to add more gamification elements to our app. We really felt that we lacked these elements in our current model. Specifically, we plan on adding an XP system, a friend system(to encourage more interactions), and a points counter. We also want to branch out from seashells to animals in the ocean. It’s quite the leap but we feel that it will promote more awareness about the ecology of our local environments, in this case beaches as many people don’t really pay attention to issues regarding it.