Inspiration
Games and apps that require you to be active and social have been extremely popular recently. Our app capitalizes on this trend by incentivizing students to go around campus finding beacons, completing their challenges and earning points towards the leaderboard.
What it does
When you get into the range of the beacon, you get a notification that there is one nearby. By finding it and interacting with it, you get a quest assigned, that might be a question, a task to go somewhere or do something, etc. By completing the quest properly or giving the right answer, you complete the quest and you receive points for this. You can only get one quest a day from every particular beacon.
How I built it
The back-end was constructed using the django framework for Python. It is hosted on c9.io, which provides an excellent platform for your locally-built server. The native android app was built in Java 8.
Challenges I ran into
Constructing the database properly was the biggest struggle during the weekend. After managing to link up everything properly and getting it to work in django, in the end the problem of hosting the server in Heroku popped up. The SQLite database that we had created was unable to run on Heroku, which automatically converted it to PostgreSQL. With limited time and options, c9.io proved to be a great tool for easily hosting your server on the net.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Successfully hosting the server in an online environment with properly working End-Points for the client to use
What I learned
The database is the bread and butter of the back-end, but even if you have the perfect server, it all depends on the front-end in the end.
What's next for Beacon Quest
Finishing up the prototype; implementing the leaderboards; creating more and various challenges; working with students and staff on campus in order to provide the best user experience and content for the beacons.
BeaconQuest 2 in 2018
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