Bird's Eye View

Main page with search results
Menu to adjust search parameters
View in google Maps when redirected

Team 11

Inspiration

Kayla's dad is an avid bird watcher and was interested in a mobile app that would allow him to identify recently seen birds in the area if he happened to have extra time or was already going somewhere to look for a particular bird. He uses eBird on a regular basis to maintain checklists of the birds that he has seen, as do many other birders. He was looking for a way to make use of other's checklists to help with his bird watching endeavors. Here came the inspiration to develop Bird's Eye View to allow him to do just that.

What it does

Bird's Eye View uses the eBird database API to display a list of birds recently seen in the user's area. The user can limit how many days out to search, up to 30 days, and the distance away from current location, up to 50 km. The user can then receive directions on Google Maps to each bird's recorded GPS coordinates.

How we built it

Mobile development was done in Flutter, Google's mobile app SDK. This includes the use of Material Design widgets and community plugins.

Challenges we ran into

Storing the data from the API was difficult, as we had to learn several new concepts and functions. Stream builders and Futures in Dart are difficult to understand at first glance. The dart language and the Flutter SDK are still fairly new and not extremely well documented.

Accomplishments we're proud of

Making a fully functional app that pulls form an online API, sorts terms, and displays data beautifully.

What we learned

The Future! Actually just the Future function in Dart which is used for asynchronous execution to prevent the UI from freezing. We also learned to build with streams.
Last, but not least, we learned a lot about streams