TreeHouse

Links

• GitHub
• Devpost-Joel Cherian
• Devpost-Vaibhav Panchanadam
• Devpost-Vu Cao
• Devpost-Daniel Lu

Inspiration

We were inspired to build this app after seeing just how much heritage local businesses can hold. We discovered a small bakery in Downtown Ottawa called the Brown Loaf on a main road. When we went inside, we found that the bakery had existed since the 1970s, beginning in Japan, and making its way across the Pacific to Canada. The bakery has been an important part of the community ever since and even had a Prime Minister previously eat there. This was super surprising to us and made us realize just how many local businesses, and stories, could be lost simply because we didn’t know about them. Realizing how many hidden stories are out there, we decided to do everything in our power to ensure their heritage and history were not lost, leading to us building TreeHouse!

What it Does

TreeHouse creates a fun and competitive reason for people to go out and explore their communities, visit and learn about important monuments and heritage sites, support local businesses and more, through a mobile game app. TreeHouse gives you recommendations for underrated local spots and encourages you to walk around and explore them, and through a simple photo learn a variety of interesting facts and the history of places. Time spent exploring is rewarded through finishing achievements, daily quests, gaining experience points, levelling up and competing with your friends, and looking back and remembering all the fun and interesting places you’ve visited with your friends throughout the year.

How We Built It

Using a combination of Javascript, NodeJS, and React for the front end and Python with Flask and several APIs for the back end, we created an interactive and visually appealing mobile app that is simple and easy to use. We made heavy use of MongoDB and Neurelo to easily GET, POST and PATCH user data such as travel histories, achievements, friends etc. We use GeoAPI, RapidAPI and Google Gemini’s Vertex API, to create the map exploration, local site recommendation, and a feature that lets you take a photo and be given a short history lesson, fun facts and heritage-related to the sites you visited.

Challenges We Ran Into

One of the major challenges we ran into during our development was two of our team members falling under the weather, with one of them having to attend the hackathon online due to his condition. Not having a team member in person was incredibly challenging, as we could not discuss ideas or implementation to nearly the depth that we would normally be able to. Another challenge we ran into was the implementation of vertex AI and the Gemini API as a whole. The Gemini API was important to generating information about locations from images, and errors in the process forced us to work through unfamiliar territory to find new ways to approach the solution.

Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

We are extremely proud of being able to make a fully reactive, and functioning mobile app that also looks good visually, all in the short period of 36 hours. As a whole we all made significant progress in improving our skills for Computers Science, because we all had the opportunity to learn and use software that was completely new to us, and ran into several unexpecting issues and long stretches of debugging and reading documentation trying to figure out how to fix them. But in the end, we all managed to get a firm grasp of many of the software and technologies that we learned and used, and are proud to be able to have created a clean and working product despite the challenges.

What We Learned

We managed to take away a lot from our development process of TreeHouse. Firstly, we learned how to better adapt to unexpected scenarios. From sick team members to malfunctioning APIs, we had a wide range of challenges during this project. However, we learned to adapt to these problems, and used it to better our abilities to think on the fly and work as a team! We also learned how to apply new technologies to our advantage, learned about important programming techniques and technologies like databasing and got experience using several new APIs. For example, implementing Neurelo into our solution helped streamline our databasing vastly simplifying our initial methods for requesting from MongoDB. 

What's Next?

Moving forward, we hope to improve on TreeHouse’s current features and add a few, which include sharing achievements with friends, partnering with local businesses to set up loyalty programs and incentives through quests and achievements for customers, and introducing more user-led community events! All-in-all, we hope to be able to positively impact communities, local businesses, and of course, you!