Firefighter App

A novel productivity app that uses charitable donations to the Australian Wildfire Relief Effort as the incentive to study

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Inspiration

Our team knew coming into TAMUHack2020 that we wanted to build an application with some form of positive environmental impact. Hearing USAA and Google Cloud present in the opening ceremony allowed us to come up with an idea where students can make a world contribution while getting educated.

What It Does

Study Focus Timer for Students! Students select a certain amount of time to study and, after completion without distraction, the app contributes a small donation to one of 4 charities providing aid to the Australian Wildfire Relief Fund. Engaging GUI that spawns in "flames" all around the map, representing donation goals that the user can select and "put out" by studying or watching an ad. 100% Ad-Revenue towards Australian Wildfire Relief Fund. Access to donation pages for direct donations also supported.

How We Built It

After descriptive sketches and brainstorming, tasks were split into Front-End and Back-End solutions in which each team member could contribute not only their technical skills, but also more importantly our creativity. Front-End, comprised of Leah and Canyon, was put in charge of the splash page, Australian map overlay, and flame GUI. Back-End, comprised of Aneil and Andres, was put in charge of the timer sourcecode, donation webview kit implimentation, and ad implimentation.

Challenges We Ran Into

The team was largely inexperienced with iOS Programming, which made even the most simple tasks like creating a ViewScreen and linking it to buttons difficult. The biggest problem Back-end ran into was implimenting tabs and multiple pages in the app, being able to edit each page separately, and avoiding conflicts between competing functionalities. Front-end ran into similar problems with their tasks, and struggled initially to do basic design on a new IDE.

Accomplishments That We're Proud of

Firefighter is the first iOS application all of our team members have ever created. We are proud to have developed many different functionalities in such a short amount of time. We are glad to use what we have learned in the classroom and use to solve a tangible, yet very important problem in our world.

What We Learned

Because this was our first exposure to iOS development and we only had 2 MacBooks between 4 team members, we had to rely on tools like GitHub. We learned to better communicate as a cohesive unit and merge code every other hour or so. We learned the importance of having a solid design plan before diving into programming. A good plan goes a long way when developing an application in 24 hours.

What's Next for Firefighter App

The next step for the app is to add push notifications for when study time or break time is over. Most of all, Firefighter could also be scaled up to more world solutions, not just the Australia!

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