Inspiration
We were inspired to make this app because our school is struggling with issues such as vandalism, bullying, and racial slurs. America as a whole has been struggling to contain school violence and shootings. Because of these issues, our group has decided to make an app to record and fix these issues.
What it does
Campus Portal is an app that allows you to instantly report any issue around school as soon as you see it. Right when you open the app, a camera is opened, allowing you to quickly take a picture of the problem. Then, you submit what exactly the problem is and any other additional comments. This is completely anonymous, so everyone's privacy is maintained. Once a submission is made, the location from where the submission was made is recorded on to a map using GPS coordinates. This will create a map with a lot of "hitpoints", and specific descriptions of the problems at those locations, so that school staff/administrators can respond to issues faster and prevent those problems from occurring in the future.
How we built it
We have built this app using Android Studio. We were going to build it with MIT App Inventor, but we have realized that there are more features in Android Studio. We have used Intents and other commands to navigate through our app and by using buttons and text. In each page, we have incorporated several questions and other things to get more information from the users. We had used the OnClickListener command to program each and every button to clearly allow it to nagivate to the specified page that we have wanted the user to go to. To incorporate our camera feature, we have used the mediastore command, to take the picture assuming that the app was downloaded into a proper phone.
Challenges we ran into
Some of the challenges we have ran into, were mostly about programming the app. When we had first started, I had little to no experience in coding, so I had to search up each some of the commands and features part of Android Studio. The biggest problem was implementing the camera feature, because it had to open the camera app, and take a picture using the app's interface. We had spent several hours on this, but we had eventually figured it out. The last challenge we ran into was using the phone's GPS signal, to pinpoint and place a marker at the current location, so we can implement the specific areas where a problem in a school occured. However, we weren't able to use GPS to place a marker, so we had just asked the question as part of the page.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud to even learn Android Studio because it was a pretty hard and tough interface to work with. No matter what happens, we will be happy.
What we learned
We learned a lot of Android Studio features, and now we have learned to use it easily without confusion. We will soo learn to use more adcvanced features to make better features in our app.
What's next for Campus Protector
We need to share our application with schools near us so that they can use it and give us feedback. We can then improve our app and implement it on a bigger level, such as the state or national level.
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