HACC2021-HMARCamino
01 Dec 2021What is HMARCamino?
HMARCamino is web-application that helps the Hawai’i Marine Animal Response (HMAR) volunteers and staff members to organize and collect sighting reports from the public. HMAR’s objective is to streamline the way the public makes reports. Currently, their only means of collecting information is through a hotline number which has many issues. These issues include getting duplicate reports, people not knowing where they were located, and poor communication between the observer and dispatch.
We built HMARCamino to solve these problems. By making an online reporting platform, we were able to make reports viewable for both volunteers and staff members. With an online reporting system, we can condense reports and make similar reports appear as one single report. We used Google Maps to tackle the location problem, and AWS S3 to allow users to upload pictures. This can help HMAR see the severity of the sighting and allows the volunteers to see the general area before responding.
To view the github repository.
My contributions to HMARCamino
During the semester, I’ve implemented AWS S3 storage a few times and it was similar in this project as well. The only difference was finding a way to do multiple image uploading for the reports. Unlike the other projects, our team thought it would be best if users could send a gallery of images. (A picture is worth a thousand words, so a few photos means a couple thousand right?) The goal was to make it easier for the volunteers to see the area of the report, and to find the exact location of the animal.
Another main contribution was exporting data to an Excel spreadsheet. This was one of the main requirements of this challenge and I didn’t know where to start. I found a few videos online that helped me through the process, but eventually I figured it out. The current implementation allows users to pick a date range and it would automatically pull those records from our database to be downloaded in csv format. One of the biggest challenges of creating the export component was reformatting the data. Since we were getting location data from Google Maps, I had to draw lines on a map and find coordinates that would match up to North, South, East, or West.
The final main contribution was the premodals for reports. There were very specific layouts and options for users to pick and this would redirect them to the proper resource, or send them to the reports page if they met a certain criteria. This wasn’t too hard using React, but the options and layout were a little confusing in the beginning.
What I learned / Reflection / Experience
As soon as we completed the Meteor Hackathon, our team went straight into HACC. For most of us, we had other things to work on. Personally, I had exams and projects to finish up since I spent every waking moment on the Meteor Hackathon. The timing of HACC really threw us out of our jam. Because of this, we decided early on that we would complete the project, BUT if we didn’t win, we wouldn’t be disappointed.
One of the first differences I noticed between the two hackathons was that the requirements were a lot more strict. We weren’t allowed the creative freedom to build whatever we wanted, instead we were supposed to follow a specific challenge requirement. Because of this, there were a lot of questions to be answered. We had a lot of meetings to figure out exactly what we should implement so that the project was cohesive. Another difference was that this challenge had a side effect of being focused around mobile development. Unfortunately, no one in our team had experience with this. One of the challenges we faced was scaling everything on our pages properly.
Through this class, I learned that participating in a Hackathon isn’t as scary as I thought it would be. I learned so many new things about Meteor, React, and working in a team. All of our hard work had paid off, HMARCamino placed #1 in HACC. I’m excited to see how much my team members will have grown the next time I work with them. :)