Deiku

Integrating our community, one place at a time.

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Inspiration

During the COVID-19 pandemic, it's become a lot more difficult for many people to find safe things to do outside of their home - or to even have the confidence to step outside. As a result, Vitamin D deficiency has become an increasingly severe, unforeseen side effect of responsible lockdown measures. Our app's name, Deiku, derives from the Japanese phrase "to go by" (で行く / de iku), simply communicating the purpose of our app - to take a deeper look at those places that you'd normally "pass by".

What it does

To help combat this, we've developed an app that gamifies going outside and getting sunlight in a safe manner while exploring the community, helping small businesses, and engaging with new greenspaces - all of which will hopefully allow users to develop a deeper appreciation for the world around them.

How we built it

We created a mobile application primarily through the Flutter SDK, leveraging back-end JSON lists as a database for the final product. We chose to develop on a mobile platform to appeal to realistic use cases; a mobile framework further enables gamification by keeping the user constantly engaged on a device that they frequently carry with them.

Challenges we ran into

At the beginning of the project, we had many ideas on how to develop the product. However, we didn't factor in time constraints from both the structure of the hackathon and the time it would take us to learn to implement the tech stack. Considering the final amount of time we had to actually program the project, we had to streamline our vision to achieve realistic deliverables.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

3 of our members were entirely new to the hackathon format and were proud to have quickly acclimated as a team and learned new skills that will surely come in handy for the future.

What we learned

Nhan and Jeni learned the Dart programming language so they could develop using the Flutter SDK. Akshay learned about the JSON database format and how to implement Java apps on Android Studio. Athulya learned Kotlin, although it was not implemented in the final product, and refreshed his memory on Java. Neal gained more experience using the Flutter SDK and valuable team management skills.

What's next for Deiku

Given more time, we want to fully realize our original vision for Deiku, which primarily includes cloud integration with Google Maps API and Google Firebase/Firestore. The former would be implemented for geolocation to develop a truly local leaderboard system and to access Google's vast array of metadata associated with real-life small businesses and greenspaces around the world. The latter would be implemented to create a cloud-based authorization system and provide a noSQL database server that could handle incoming user data, including login information, college names, and a point system.

We'd like to thank HackTX for giving us this valuable learning opportunity and we hope to come back next year.

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