Coastar
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Overview
Coastar was meant to be an application to be used by one of the organizations that were participating in the Hawaii Annual Coding Challenge. My team and I participated in the NIC Hawaii – Hawaii Marine Animal Response (HMAR) Sighting & Reporting App challenge, where we needed to create an app that would streamline the process for people who are around different parts of the island help identify animals that are in distress.
Contributions
One of my contributions was helping create markers for the map by utilizing the Google Maps API with Meteor. There is a section on the application that redirects to the map page that is only accessible by the admins, or organization staff. The map initializes on Oahu, but the user can move the map around to see that there are different markers also on different islands.
Another one of my contributions was helping create the filter for the application, the user can reduce the amount of markers they see by picking a topic to filter by and typing in the keyword into the search. It reduces the amount of markers live so as the user types it reduces the amount of markers. The user can pick between the different filters of “All,” “Date,” “Island,” and “Animal.”
Here is the deployed map with the given example data we had in the settings.json, it is zoomed in on Oahu, but is currently shows all of the markers on different islands if there were any. This is what it looks like before the filter is applied
This is what the map looks like after we apply the “Animal” filter and search for “seal,” it shows only the markers where the animals in distress are seals. This filter could be helpful to the organization in finding a specific marker for a specific animal at a specific place. The dispatcher could then possibly tell where the animal is exactly and send some help for the animal. Had this map have over a hundred more entries of data it could also give insight into patterns of why or where these animals get into distress.
Difficulties and Hardships
Although we eventually got it working in the end, using the Google API for my teams purposes was a bit tricky to get off the ground because when my team and I tried to map the coordinates, the Google Map would keep updating and it seemed that the markers did not update with the google map so they all went to the center of the map everytime the map had refreshed. However, once we got over this struggle, we were able to do everything else that was needed in the app with not many problems. We were able to get the add report working, all of the information can be passed to the markers if needed, and by the end of the project due date it looks like my team’s application was looking good. However, we were not able to place in the HACC, and although we did not place, I still really appreciated the time I got to spend with my peers.
The Experience
My team and I were able to meet up a couple times to work on the project, and I really enjoyed the experience being able to finally communicate with someone else in-person after being in quarantine for so long. We were able to get a bunch of stuff done when we did meet up, but we did run into some scheduling issues such as midterms and projects that needed to be worked on outside of the HACC so we couldn’t put our all into the competition. Everyone on the team just so happens to be busy during a good chunk of the HACC and because of that we couldn’t get that far during the HACC but after the HACC had finished we had improved our application by a lot.
For Future Self-Improvements
There were a couple mistakes that I made throughout the HACC, and I can definitely improve on them. I can definitely improve on learning to commit sooner to main and communicate more with the team that I will do it. That way they can get the changes that I’ve made and because of the way our app works we needed to complete some things side by side so if one of us is stuck someone else might get stuck on something. I will actively remember this experience so that I do not make the mistake in the future, hopefully I can do another competition like this in the future so that I can redeem myself in this aspect.