Space Apps Challenge 2018

Repository: https://github.com/isabellesb214/SpaceAppsHSVHHS18..

Background:

Shuttle launches are truly once in a life time experiences. For many of those on our team, these launches have been pivotal as to why we wanted to enter the computer science field and why we are interested in space. With such significant and powerful and powerful events happening all over the world, shouldn't we bring the access to these launches to everyone.

In order to bring more availability to people globally, we understood that we needed to create a tool that could be accessed easily from any device. "LaunchTime" does just that. As a webpage, a person from almost any device can access this instrument as long as they have access to the internet. On the website, it not only informs our visitors as to why shuttle launches are important but how they can retrieve this worthwhile experience with a built-in application that demonstrates launches near them based on continent, company, and date.

While disguised as a tool to only provide people a way to access launches, LaunchTime is much more. Rocket launches bring more awareness to the barrier breaking science that is being completed everyday and why they are so important in our modern times. In our website, we accomplish this all with a few clicks of a button.

Future:

If given more time to expand our project, we would have our backend and front end parts of our project working together as well as expanding the amount of pages on our website. On our website, we would have pages detailing information:

• several different rocket launching locations
  • history
  • travel
  • significance
• advice when traveling to location
• projected launch dates
• pages for live streams of current launches
• community page for our users to interact with one another

On our backend, we are able to filter through our database and display information but it does not hook up with our html form page that our users use to request information from the database.

Challenges:

We found it difficult to gain much information about space launches with only two links. While we gained as much information as we could from these sources, if possible with further research, we would have gotten more to add to our database.

With each our members knowing a different coding language, we found it hard as a team to work all together not to mention it being our first hackathon. We divided the work the best as we could with most our team members learning new languages and resources such as Python, PHP, and Javascript. Knowing no common language, we worked in two different groups with all of us gaining and learning new skills throughout this competition.

To start out we assembled our data into a usable file; however, we did not know how to interpret this data in python, we shared our struggle with a mentor which pointed us in the direction of pandas, this allowed us to manipulate our data and we used that to filter the data down to a result. This is the backend of out project.

After this we needed to develop a user interactive website. We were steered in a direction of using Flask and HTML to allow a user to select filters from a list of things and using those inputs to interact with the backend of the program. The challenge that we faced here was using flask and HTML and the initial python script to interact together and generate an output. However, in the end, we could not get Flask to work and tried moving on to PHP and Javascript neither of which were able to do with much success as we tried to get outputs through csv files, text files, excel files, and more to work with the back end of our code.

We did our best in our first hackathon competition as a team. It was fun learning how hackathons work as well as new information and exciting information about rocket launches that we had never known about before.

Resources:

Space Flight Information
- https://www.nasa.gov/launchschedule/

- http://www.spaceflightinsider.com/launch-schedule/

Photos, Videos, Music: http://thestocks.im/?utm_source=launchers

Languages and Coding Resources: Python, Editey, Panda, PHP, Javascript, Flask, HTML, CSS, Mentors, etc.