Inspiration
In our diverse team of four international students, three of us come from countries and communities where corruption and unlawful acts are rampant. We wanted to tackle this problem by incorporating an add-on to the popular Google Maps application that will alert both visitors and locals alike of more prominent danger paths.
What it does
Users will input their location of origin and destination and the fastest routes will be calculated for them. However, if any of those routes include an unsafe zone or even multiple zones (marked with a red dot), the user will be given the choice to take the next fastest and safer route as an alternative.
How we built it
A static HTML website with Google Maps API in JavaScript, data for crime reports are obtained with the Socrata API whose datasets comes from CrimeReports™.
Challenges we ran into
We were initially advised to use Native React to create a mobile application, which made perfect sense for our application. However, none of us have experience in mobile development and we spent many hours trying to set up our project. We soon realized that our time should be spent figuring out how to get data and set unsafe zones, not setting up the application.
After finally switching to a web-based application instead, we discovered that Google Maps API does not allow users to modify their route calculation algorithm in any way.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We have little to no experience with JavaScript, some of us don't have experience with HTML either. However, we managed to render the Google Maps. However, despite our lack of experience, we are proud of how much we tried to learn as much as possible.
What we learned
What's next for Protecht
To have a fully functional and user-friendly application that not only shows users of unsafe zones detected in their paths but also calculates the next fastest safest route.
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