Helpers Spot

• 

  Helpers Spot Logo

• 

  Homepage

Homelessness is a growing issue in the United States, especially California. One of our members dedicated most of her high school years volunteering to help the homeless and less fortunate. However, she had a hard time looking for places to help. She would have to contact each company to find out what they needed.

Helpers Spot is a web app that allows people to donate clothing, food, and more to homeless shelters, donation centers, food banks, and individuals in need. It allows users to use a map marked with specific locations in need of help to give their items to. When selecting a location, users automatically have access to the address. The user can allow us to use their location so they can see which location is closest to us. Additionally, they can see other HelpMates, or users, on the map.

To build this project, we used HTML and CSS to create the website, JavaScript to code with Google's Maps API, and Python with Jinja 2 to display our website live through Google's App Engine.

We encountered many issues while developing this web app. Our biggest issues were using Google's Maps API and Google App Engine. We had problems displaying pins with information on the map, app engine files not uploading to the drive (Error 404: Not Found), and our map had a period of time where it would crash our website because it was taking too much memory, which we fixed but we didn't know what we did to fix it.

Three of our group members are new to hacking and Hack Merced V is their first ever hackathon. We were able to learn how to use APIs, create websites, and collaborate to create this project and we are incredibly proud of what we have come up with. This was our first time learning HTML/CSS/JavaScript and we expected to create something very basic but we are proud with the end result. We feel most accomplished with our map, because this is our first time encountering and using APIs. We learned to utilize documentation to code our web apps and learned what to search when trying to resolve an issue.

We want to publish our web app and possibly create a mobile app for it for iOS and Android and publish those as well. We still have a few feature we need to implement, so we would like to create those.

Built With

• css
• html
• javascript
• python