Eureka!

Find "Eurekas!", or hidden local spots, to connect with your community.

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Inspiration

We were inspired by apps like Pokemon Go and GeoCache to link both technology and the physical world together to promote interaction with the user's local environment. Seeing how technology is so widespread firsthand, we realized the negatives of this growth despite the positives of technology. With Eureka!, we hope to promote users to venture into their local communities, establish connections with like minded people and businesses, increase environmentalism, protect public infrastructure, and more.

What it does

Eureka! is a website that displays nearby "Eurekas!", or local spots, businesses, or parks, and promotes users to interact and invest in their local environment by increasing visibility of these places and events. When users visit these "Eurekas!", they must check in to verify the validity of their attendance and then they are awarded points of experience (xp) that can be used for Eureka pets. These pets, similar to badges, are awarded to mark the achievements in number of attendance or xp of certain types of "Eureka!" like nature, coffee, or food related locations or events. Also, there is a monthly leaderboard that displays the top 12 users in your locale and friend groups to promote even greater interaction with "Eurekas!". These gamification elements increase user investment and enjoyment as they connect more with their local community.

How we built it

We built Eureka! with several different technologies, mainly MongoDB and HTML/CSS. As our project has a big database component with the "Eureka!"s themselves and users, we utilized MongoDB to create editable databases. Additionally, we used Django and Jinja for data organizational purposes. For our website, we primarily used HTML and CSS that we designed from scratch. We created a multi tab website with interactable features and a live map that shows your location and the nearby "Eurekas!".

Challenges we ran into

While building this project, our greatest troubles were from using MongoDB for the first time. We began with setup issues then integration into our project. Thankfully, we were able to get help from mentors and peers to complete our databases and use them in our project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of building Eureka! in such a short time. While we began with numerous ideas about features, we were able to build a functional project (and more) with five of the original features that we thought of (nearby Eureka! visualization table, Eureka! database, user database, Eureka! attendance verification, and an interactable map of nearby Eurekas).

What we learned

Through Eureka!, we learned to use databases with MongoDB and expanded our UI/UX knowledge as we thought about creating an extremely user friendly website. With this, we will be able to use MongoDB and other databases in the future for our other projects.

What's next for Eureka!

We hope to expand Eureka! to make it open sourced to create an ever updating database of "Eurekas!" for the most accurate representation of local "Eurekas!". After that, we would like to change into an iOS and Android application so it is easier for users to use it while on the move.

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