GT Explorer | Devpost

Your Tech Adventure Starts Here.

Inspiration

Inspired by games like Pokemon Go and Geoguesser, GT Explorer attempts to mix these ideas with a social platform like Instagram or BeReal with daily posts, social component.

What it does

GT Explorer is an app used by Georgia Tech students during Week of Welcome to better familiarize themselves with Georgia Tech campus. Each day, there are 4 mystery locations that students must go to and take a photo at. The earlier a student gets to the location, the more points they earn. Over the course of 5 days, students will go to 20 different around campus ranging from places like the CRC on West Campus to CODA in the heart of Midtown.

How we built it

GT Explorer was made using SwiftUI and Firebase for the frontend and backend. We used various Apple APIs like AVFoundation (for the camera view) and CoreLocation for getting the user's current location. Firebase storage was used for hosting user post images/user profile pics, and Firebase Firestore was used to organize information about a user's social graph and their posts.

Challenges we ran into

For many of our members, getting started with GitHub was a challenge with syncing files and properly commiting, pushing, and versioning our code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of the overall look and feel of the app. For many members, this was their first chance at developing SwiftUI views and backend functions with firebase. With this in mind, we are happy to have essentially shipped a complete product that actually works.

What we learned

With members coming from various amounts of knowledge of iOS development, each member took away different new concepts and techniques for iOS development. A few popular concepts brought up are as follows,

Interfacing with the Swift Firebase API
Composing SwiftUI views and connecting them to backend functions
Proper software development practices of reviewing code
Developing tests for backend functions using the XCTest structure to better develop robust and reliable software performance

What's next for GT Explorer

In a perfect world, we would like to introduce GT Explorer for next Fall semester at Georgia Tech. Some additional functionalities we'd like to add include...