Inspiration
Our community is heavily impacted by the recent immigration laws and increase in ICE raids. This injustice plagues our community and continues to hurt members of our community. Fear and anger has overcome our communities. We want to make a change in order to provide hope for families who unfortunately have to face ICE raids. We were inspired by SafeTrek's app design to build ours.
What it does
UNIDOS provides the ability to input your information during the signing up process. You input who you are, your location, and other useful information. The app provides several buttons where, if pressed, sends an immediate message to the local Rapid Responders network, such as PACT and SIREN.
How we built it
We first built the basis of what we like the app to look like. We used JSX in React Native and Expo to build the website. We decided to create a website to provide more information and build onto the things we wanted to add to the app- there we used the 3 web development languages.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into several challenges. Our biggest challenge was trying to code an app in a language we were completely new to. None of us have extensive coding experience with other languages besides the 3 basic web development languages. We were stuck as to where to start, how to implement our many ideas, pacing ourselves as we confronted new errors. We were running against the clock as we struggled to find ways to make our code work as one.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Creating a basis of what we would like the app to do! We coded in a new type of setting and immersing ourselves to learn new things. Coding the app, although it was basic, was difficult, but we trudged on. Making sure we all worked together to finish every aspect as much as we could.
What we learned
We learned the importance of pacing and familiarizing ourselves with a language we are unfamiliar with. Throughout the 24 hours, we continued to work through the errors- regardless of how frustrated we all were when syntax errors kept arising. We learned how to find alternate solutions to problems we were unable to solve. Everyone in our group has never been to a Hackathon before, so this whole weekend has been a learning experience.
What's next for UNIDOS
We want to continue working on it, in order to actually allow families to use it. We want to get in touch with non-profits who specialize in protecting immigrants in order to receive guidance. We want our website to continue growing and our app to implement useful tools.
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