Wayfinder - UH Map Application

About Wayfinder

Wayfinder is an application created to help students, faculty, or visitors to the University of Hawaii at Manoa campus, navigate their way around. The application combines crowdsourcing and collaboration to help the users find all the tricky and hidden places of interest, that Google Maps misses, such as bathrooms and vending machines. By providing directions, exploring options and user submitted places of interest, the application makes navigation at the University much easier!

Click here for a comprehensive walk through of the application LoveMilkTea

LoveMilkTea - HACC 2017

The Wayfinder app, initially started out as LoveMilkTea. LoveMilkTea was the app that a team of 7 other ICS students and I created that won the 2017 HACC. HACC 2017 is the second annual month-long hackathon put on by Governor David Ige and the State of Hawaii where participants look to find solutions for state issues. My team took up the challenge, submitted by Garret T. Yoshimi, the VP for Information Technology at the University of Hawaii, of creating an application that would make navigating a complicated campus, such as the UH campus, a bit easier. Our team set out to quickly put together a creative and effective solution to the problem in the short three weeks deadline. We pulled together a pretty decent working prototype and managed to win 1st place!

Development of LoveMilkTea

LoveMilkTea/Wayfinder was built using Ionic, which is an open-source SDK for hybrid mobile app development built on Angular. This means our team was able to easily create a web and mobile app from one code base, written in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. We used the Google Maps API for our map and decided to stick with Google Firebase for authentication and databasing.

The first three weeks of the application development were a part of the HACC contest, so the intent was to get a basic working application ready for the judges. Our team split up the application into major focus areas and each tackled our parts. We used issue driven development and met twice a week. After the HACC, our team continued to refine the app as a part of a ICS491 special projects course, where we worked on cleaning up the code, added functionality, and rebranded ourselves as Wayfinder (Apparently LoveMilkTea is a bit confusing).

My Contributions

My main focus areas were the administrator page and functions, and user accounts and authentication. I created the user accounts and the abiity for users to submit points, along with the administrators portal to approve, edit or deny submissions

Lessons Learned

I learned so many things from this experience, there is no way to list them all. First of all, the entire experience was super fun and challenging. The 2017 HACC was the first hack-a-thon I have ever participated in, and learning how to put together a functioning product with new technology in a short period of time was a very valuable experience. It also gave me a lot of confidence. Our team chose a platform (Ionic) that none of us had ever used before, yet we created a decent working application in a short amount of time. This proved to me that the skills I am learning are versatile and I have gained confidence in tackling new and foreign challenges.

Second of all, even though I sometimes assume I am a pro at team work by now, I learned some more important lessons in working with a larger team. We had our fair share of struggles to include schedule conflicts, and work load balance between all the members. The biggest take away I have from this project is the importance of face to face meetings. The team work and motivation throughout the HACC was great. People worked hard and got a lot accomplished. After the HACC, the motivation dwindled and the team hardly ever met face to face due to other priorities taking precedence. This made getting small things accomplished and keeping up to date with progress (or lack of) and communication in general difficult. All in all, I think we tend to take face to face interaction for granted in the age of technology, but just because most of the work is done virtually, doesn't mean that the face to face interaction isn't just as valuable.

Altogether I am very happy I took the ICS491 course and participated in the 2017 HACC. I never would have guess that we would win first place, and I gained invaluable experience. Plus it was a lot of fun!