Inspiration
The Cities of the future are shiny and white, with tall glass buildings and pastoral scenes of clean streets and healthy people. While we focus so much on the Internet of Things, the next "Uber", and solutions to trivial problems. Our team chose to see past this dreamy fantasy and work towards the city of tomorrow - both figuratively and literally - with an app that helps people clean up the streets and increases awareness of those that need help around us.
What it does
RAKCity stands for Random Acts of Kindness City, an app prototype that connects end users with causes that need help. With the dream of connecting all charitable organizations to users, RAKCity encourages users to participate by facing them up against other humanitarians in their city. End Users log their time at charitable organizations and are given points in return. With the goal of eventually supporting all charitable causes from soup kitchens to sparing change to shoveling your neighbor's sidewalk, RAKCity hopes to be a truly trans-formative app. While the UI and back-end are limited, the Idea stretches much further.
How we built it
RAKCity was built in Bootstrap, with a basic navbar layout. After hours of mySQL problems, a mentor suggested use of the FireBase database by google, which was implemented to add users and track points. A minimal CSS theme was developed with a city background.
Challenges we ran into
A quick list: -We had too many good ideas to pick one quickly. -Only one of us knew Node, the easiest choice for our project -No one had a Mac to develop IOS. -No one knew MySQL -Only some of us knew git -We had a lot of common skills and not many complimentary ones -4 inexperienced git users working at once led to a lot of merge errors -One of our members (Waseef) had to Uber back to Hamilton in the early morning on Saturday because his Grandmother was in the hospital :( -He was the only one who knew Node :(
Accomplishments that we're proud of
-We learned a ridiculous amount about collaborative coding and teamwork in a frustrating environment -We each gained a lot of knowledge, a lot of which we didn't even end up using, like PHP calls to MySQL. -We got a database working after hours of debugging -Some of us learned how to solve a rubik's cube
What we learned
-How to work in a team -How to use git -How to use the Google Maps API -How to Point a Domain at Hosting -How to Use Facebook Authentication and NoSQL with firebase -How to deal with adversity and not overheat
What's next for RAKCity
Pitches, Telling our parents, and further development. While the prototype is basic, the idea has merit and could truly be a powerful tool to prompt social awareness and action. Development of a full backend with further authentication and a "friend" system. Implementing a partially written idea about being able to visualize people's point rankings by the height of their building in the RAKCity. A lot of reflection and realizing how much better we could do it 5 days later.
NOTE: we registered a domain name "RAKCity.com" But had a lot of trouble with Domain.com hosting and their tech support. We hosted it on another domain that was lying around, monkeyeats.co.
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