UC IC

Inspiration

Our group was brainstorming any conflicts that would arise around the school campus. The topic of safety came to mind due to the recent incidents that were on the news about students going missing, murdered, or accidents in general. Seeing that most of our team attends UCSC, we thought about how we could prevent such incidents happening to students here.

What it does

Our app connects UCSC students to campus police, reports incidents or missing persons, with the touch of a button. Additionally, users can upload an image of who is missing/incidents or report dangerous behavioral situations (sexual assault). We also aim to make this a safe environment for users because we feel that if someone were to report someone for dishonorable/disruptive behavior, users are able to report or add additional information and comments anonymously to protect themselves for their safety. Our app also stores the history of incident reports. We have a page solely dedicated to missing persons so students, university staff, and the police can keep tabs on who they should look for.

How we built it

We wanted to create an app at first but most of us aren’t as well-versed in some of the coding languages that are needed to run an app. We decided to build a web-app design using mainly HTML and CSS. We used Figma to create the mockup for UC IC. Since our app requires data being stored, we focused on creating a server to store what could be history reports from users using the app.

Challenges we ran into

Challenges that arose besides coming up with an idea was partnering up with Google Maps. In order for us to allow students to pin their location with Google Maps, it was hard for us to enable user interaction on Google Maps API. We also thought about any safety issues that would pertain to our app’s users such as the security of private information. We all had to learn how to develop a framework because we are all beginners. Another challenge for us was scalability - how easily would we be able to expand our app to other campuses or other platforms. Would our app legally be adopted by other colleges or would this be used for private government purposes only?

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were surprised that there were o breakdowns! We all learned how to create the framework, which was cool. We were really proud of ourselves learning Figma from scratch. We were also impressed by our ability to collaborate as a team, having great communication skills which allowed us to divide the workload evenly and efficiently.

What we learned

Everything is really intense all the time, but we had the best time gaining knowledge in coding, design, collaboration, and learning how much work goes into creating the simplest features. We all got a small taste of how intense and rigorous creating a program would be. Our team really appreciated the opportunity to hone our skills while creating UC IC.

What's next for UC IC

We hope to successfully curate UC IC into an app so that it would be used hopefully in the near future. We believe that UC IC can prevent students from unfortunate accidents and that they will feel more comfortable reaching out to first responders on campus and report for the safety of others!

Built With

• css
• figma
• firebase
• github
• google-maps
• html
• javascript
• vscode