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PlowPath
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Heat Map
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Google Maps
Inspiration
After looking at York University's challenge regarding the ice and snow removal, our team wanted to build a simple, but effective web app that would allow snow removal workers and other employees managing the removal system to see which roads are in most need of clearing. As well, the app would be available to students and staff at York University, who could potentially request clearing of a certain street.
What it does
The web app displays a simple heat map indicating what type of potential dangers there are on each street. The danger level is indicated by 3 colour codes, with green being safe, yellow being cautious, and red being dangerous/severe. Also, the app displays the York University campus in google maps so that users will be able to more easily identify which streets they need to travel on, making their clearing requests accurate.
How we built it
Our team first developed a mockup of what the web app would like in Sketch. After we used ReactJS and Node.js to implement the front-end as well as the Google Cloud's map API.
Challenges we ran into
Slight challenges we had were flushing out our idea and determining how the app would work differently for students/staff, and snow removal employees. As well, we had minor issues with displaying Google Maps on the web app.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're satisfied that we were able to produce a high-level version of this app that definitely has more potential and scalability as we could apply this app to all university campuses and larger offices.
What we learned
Three members on the team had little to no experience with ReactJS, so being able to learn and use a new JS library with the assistance of one of our team members was very rewarding. As well, implementing the Google Maps API was a new thing we learned.
What's next for PlowPath
As we do not have direct information regarding York U's streets and their road condition statuses, implementing that information directly in real-time from a database would greatly boost this app's practicality. We also hope that we can scale this app so that it is used on all relevant university campuses and large offices.
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