Snapshot

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Prototype

Inspiration

More than half of harassment and bullying cases at schools go unreported; students cited shame or embarrassment as why they didn’t tell anyone. With this alarming statistic, our program, Snapshot, gives students an anonymous platform to report incidents at their school.

Schools in our district are decrepit and funding for renovations is scarce. Meanwhile, bullying is rampant and preventative measures backfire. Snapshot aims to tackle these two problems.

Personally, we have dealt with administration who are aware of issues, but do not devote any time towards fixing them. Snapshot provides accountability and transparency: fixing problems in a snap.

Along the way, we realized the similarities between our idea and Snapchat.

What it does

Students with Snapshot can take a photo of an incident (ranging from bullying, sanitation, safety, or a malfunction/damage) anywhere within their school. The app prompts the user to rate the severity of the problem and provide an optional description. All submissions are anonymous; administration are notified of any reports.

From a received photo, the GPS location is taken and is placed on a map of the school. A "heat map" is generated, collating all the coordinates. A larger radius on the map represents an increased amount of reported incidents, whilst a smaller radius represents less incidents. Redder areas correlate to a higher severity within that area, and bluer areas correlate to minor problems.

How we built it

We built this using Figma, Replit, html, css, and javascript, as well as by using a Google API.

Challenges we ran into

The majority of us did not have experience with coding. Because of that, we decided to use Figma. Operating Figma was a challenge, too, because it was a tool that we did not have a lot of experience with. Some aspects of our idea were not supported by Figma, and other aspects were beyond our expertise. However, by learning Figma's functions and how we could incorporate our own code into the software, we figured out how to create our final prototype.

Time was a definite strain, too. Our team was put together last-minute and some members were not available for the entire 36 hours.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Half of our group had never done a hackathon before; an enthralling experience it was. Making it through the 36 hours was an achievement of itself.

The brainstorming and idea phase was something we were especially proud of. We used the guiding questions, which led to an earnest discussion of the faults in our education system.

Using the Google Maps API was an achievement to be proud of. By pretending to be a branch business, we were able to have multiple locations within the same building. Whenever a student visited a "business" and reported an incident, administrators would be able to see that data through Google Cloud's built-in analytics.

We were proud of the group dynamic that we cultivated considering we were all nearly strangers to each other. It was encouraging to see how well we worked together.

What we learned

We learned how to use Figma to create a working prototype for an app, and how to employ APIs and include cross-platform programming in our work.

What's next for Snapshot

We plan expanding the geocoder API (https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/geocoding) that provides coordinates for any picture taken with Snapshot, and then translates those coordinates to a location on the heatmap — what we initially wanted to incorporate.