GEOdle

Inspiration

For our datathon project, we drew inspiration from the two popular games: Wordle and Geoguessr. Firstly, we chose Geoguessr because it was a perfect way for us to utilize and incorporate the Melissa Data resources into our work. Secondly, we saw that Wordle would be not only a fun, colorful way to gamify the geospatial data we were working with but also a window of opportunity to display our data extraction and analysis in the form of hints, guiding the user towards the correct answer.

What It Does

At a glance, our project allows a user 5 chances to guess a randomly picked city. With each guess, they are provided with a hint that will help them get closer to the correct city. These hints were generated using data extraction and analysis of Melissa Data datasets and tell the user useful information such as population size, dominant ethnic group, etc.

Challenges

Along the way, we ran into many obstacles. Our first wall happened to be getting things off the ground and running. Ideation with a creative twist was challenging because we wanted our idea to work in tandem with the Melissa Data resources and felt like there were not too many fun themes/topics that would fit the mold. Eventually, we came up with our vision to gather aspects from both Wordle and Geoguessr. Following our first milestone, our second obstacle was data cleaning/enriching, getting rid of unnecessary features and adding new ones. Once we figured out exactly what we needed and how we needed it, it was all a matter of implementation afterwards. Last but not least, our biggest issue was rendering GeoJSON with the Reverse GeoCode API due to authentication issues. Thanks to the help of the mentors, we were able to correctly set up the API to retrieve the necessary information.

What's Next?

For future additions, we hope to develop the scalability of our project further by expanding the map selection from exclusively Orange County cities to the United States and hopefully even the entire world. Other add-ons we hope to implement are database optimizations, mobile device support, and a win-streak feature.