awayfrom.tech | Devpost

Search for national parks or campgrounds
View National Park Information
See more information and a map to the national park
Book a flight to the location and see how crowded the location will be. View activities available at the location.
View campground information
Google Cloud Dashboard
Google Cloud Firestore Database
Google Cloud Build Process

Inspiration

A majority of our team members are a part of Scouts America. We frequently participate in outdoor getaway activities, especially camping. When we heard about the theme for Bon Voyage Hacks, we immediately knew that we wanted to address some of the challenges that we face on a frequent basis while planning for our trips. We often found it difficult to find new camping locations, considering that popular search engines only recommend the same 2-3 places, which are always crowded. We wanted a solution that would show us numerous locations which we could choose from. Ultimately through this hackathon, we were able to create a solution that we will continue to use in the future.

What it does

Our website allows users to search for national parks and campgrounds, within their designated state. When a user clicks on a location, we provide snippets of information useful to the travel-goer , such as the location, what amenities the location has, activities available at the location as well as a short description of the location. If the location is far from the user, they can also search and book flights to the location directly off our website. awayfrom.tech features countless other features including a rating system, and a system to predict how crowded a location will be based on weather, season, website activity, ratings, and more.

How we built it

Our website was built using html, css and javascript. All the campground and park data is retrieved from multiple government databases. When a user makes a query, we then filter through all of our resources to find them the best possible results. Additionally, some operations including our system to keep track of ratings, check weather, check season, and track user website activity are all handled with google cloud. Some data is stored on google cloud firestore while complex operations including our algorithm to determine the crowd at locations are handled with the google cloud app engine.

Challenges we ran into

Our first roadblock was less than 12 hours into the hackathon, when we tried to use an API from recreation.gov, but had issues with authentication. To conquer this challenge, we decided to use another api, which gave almost the same information as the original API we originally tried to use. Perhaps the most substantial challenge we faced was deploying our backend on the google cloud app engine. We all have limited experience working with google cloud, but we were able to do it by reading documentation and watching youtube videos Furthermore, near the end of this hackathon, another problem we faced was trying to put the website onto our domain, as there were constantly problems trying to put our website onto our domain.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're extremely proud that through this hackathon, we were able to create a website/tool that is extremely useful to our members. Regardless of this hackathon's outcome, it was a great learning experience for our members and we will continue to use awayfrom.tech to plan our outdoor getaways.

What we learned

Well, since this was a first hackathon for many in our group, we have learnt how you should do a hackathon. We learnt that we need to come up with ideas fast, and although there are workshops here, its good for you to have a little background knowledge within the coding side. We also learnt and enhanced our skill in JS, HTML, CSS and learning how to implement and use APIs' correctly. We also learned how to deploy node.js files on google cloud and how to store data on google cloud firestore.

What's next for Away From Tech

We plan on implementing more specific search features for our users. We started the process of allowing the users to filter results by keywords but ultimately ran out of time to implement the feature. We also plan on increasing the number of results in our system by adding more databases. Right now our website features thousands of results, but there are many more out there which we can add.