OwlSpot

List of Hotspots at Rice campus
Landing page of our web app
Each Hotspot comes with brief information along with gallery

Inspiration

The original riddle we tackled was "how do we know whether a servery or coffee house has a long waiting line?" The only available technology was to have a photo taken at the spot periodically, which led us to question, "with all the pictures uploaded in social media today, why can't we even tell what's currently happening at the other side of the campus, right now?" By selecting a certain hotspot at the campus to be pictured repeatedly, Rice students can truly do better job not missing out on important events within the Rice community.

What it does

Users with verified Rice account will be presented with a list of 'Hotspots' nearby their location. Users are then encouraged to participate by taking a photo of the Hotspot location in order to unlock privileges; such as seeing the latest photos of the location, accessing the full gallery of the location by date and time, and being notified if something interesting is happening in the Hotspot. The users need to participate in a consecutive 'streak' in order to maintain their privilege. Hotspots include college common areas, major conference location, dining places, and party areas so that on Friday night, you can see for yourself which Hotspot is throwing the wildest party at the moment.

How we built it

Frontend was developed via create-react-app and Material UI while backend was developed with Node.js, Apollo GraphQL, and PostgreSQL. Frontend is deployed in AWS S3 static hosting, attached to cloudfront while backend is run at ec2 instance.

Challenges we ran into

Most of the team members didn't have lengthy experience with the latest tools in web development. There was a lot of learning as we implemented.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were careful to keep the scope under control and we managed to meet the full minimum requirements while getting enough sleep for both nights.

What we learned

We learned how to work together on a single project using modern web development tools. We learned to fully define tasks in the early stage so that everyone simply knew what to work on the next without much conflict.