WinParks

Mobile app designed to help users better explore the trails, parks, and heritage parks in Windsor.

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Inspiration

Our Inspiration to compete in the Optimizing Community Services Challenge comes from our love of the outdoors. As friends, we often go biking together exploring different parks and traversing across numerous bike trails to learn more about our city of Windsor! We saw this challenge as an opportunity to develop a technology that would allow getting to these places faster and easier for everyone.

What it does

Our hack is a mobile app called WinParks. Using our app, the user can perform a search for all the nearby parks, trails, and heritage sites in Windsor. Once the user has found a place, they are able to view that place on a map, see a detailed image of it, read an informative description, and even give it a rating. The user can toggle between a large collection of filters to only view places related to specific interests. Furthermore, the app provides user authentication using email and password, and the user has their own profile page (in progress). Note: some of these features are incomplete and shown as proof-of-concept instead.

How we built it

IDE: Android Studio Language: Kotlin with Jetpack Compose Backend: Firebase

Challenges we ran into

The hardest thing was learning Jetpack Compose. We heard about Compose due to its reputation for building stunning UI. However, Compose is still in the early stages of development and this proved very problematic as some things simply would not work the way they are intended to. We lost too much time due to this and could not completely finish the app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud that we created a mobile app in the first place. And are especially proud with how we were able to gather places information from online and display it on a map.

What we learned

We learned Android development, UI design, and most importantly never to give up in the face of new concepts or technical difficulties.

What's next for WinParks

We would love to develop our app further and even use it ourselves to explore the great outdoor spaces of Windsor!

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