Welcome to Canada

Home Page
Canada
Bilingual Dictionary
O' Canada

making da social change with da newcomers to Canada. #sorry

Inspiration

Our team consists of four first generation Canadians and Americans, growing up hearing stories of the troubles our parents had when they first arrived and how long it took them to get adjusted and feel at ease with what to them was western culture. This commonality between us, is what brought us all together to create this application.

What it does

The android application we made is designed to provide immigrants whom are unfamiliar with western culture with resources for there benefit. Paying close attention to three main topics of importance. these topics included a brief overlook of Canada as a whole; an introduction to the city lifestyle that most westerners are accustomed too; and the third topic of focus was Social Habits and Culture. The application also introduces major Holidays, sending push notifications to remind the user. Information on the Canadian exchange rate and taxes from place to place in Canada. Information and images of a few landmarks from across the nation. A bilingual dictionary of useful words, where the user can choose what language to convert to out of the 10 we offer. Lastly we have a copy of the national anthem.

How we built it

We built this project using android studio and Github integration. We began with a base layout and design in android studio; then pushed it to Github, where everyone cloned it to their respective computers and worked on there individual pages. Then once the team pushed, there completed parts to Github the other team members would pull and update there own. Keeping everyone running on an updated platform. We found this approach was fast and easy and would do it again!

Challenges we ran into

The past 36 hours have been filled with challenges. The first and greatest agreeing on an idea; through out the rest of the Hackathon we were faced wit a multitude of challenges, Push Notifications, Fragment updating JSON parsing, HTTP requests, a-synced tasks, android media controls, dealing with memory errors when loading images, android studio crashing computer as well as some other hiccups along the way.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

WE ACCOMPLISHED OUR CHALLENGES

What we learned

For the most part this was our first android application, we learned a lot! Everything from connecting to the "internet of things" to sending push notifications (both much more challenging then we imagined). In working on this project we got familiarized with API's such as Wolfram and Fixer.io, and as such we became familiar with parsing XML and JSON files. These are a few of the many things we have learned here over the past 36 hours at HackWestern 2

What's next for Welcome to Canada

In the next few updates we plan to focus on the vocabulary portion. What we mean by this is we plan on increasing the size of our bilingual dictionary. As well as this we plan on increasing our language support from 10 to eventually covering all languages.