Team

Project Description

Inspiration

In Canada, we noticed that far too many people are undereducated about the indigenous peoples despite living on their lands. This motivated us to try and make an app that was accessible in information to allow the general public to have a better understanding of the people who resided on this land before us. We aimed to make the app as informative as we could in an easy-to-digest fashion so that Canadian teachers and students could use the app to teach and learn.

What it does

This app allows for quick and easy access to information about the indigenous groups’ lands that you are currently on, as well as other locations. It uses a map as a tool to convey a relationship between space and the indigenous peoples’ cultures relative to them. There are multiple tabs; one for the home page where most of the information is located, another for the map itself where you can interact with it and explore different locations, and another tab dedicated to news articles, indigenous organizations to support, and events that are taking place.

How we built it

We used Figma as a prototyping tool to create the blueprint for an app that could later be coded and developed. We used assets from the community tab on Figma and browsed through models to draw inspiration for our own mobile app. We also did some research and watched videos about the Figma software to fully utilize our abilities.

Challenges we ran into

This was both of our first times really diving into Figma, one of us had a tiny bit of experience from a past hackathon, but never had a project look as detailed and have a working interactive prototype. Since both of us had little to no experience with the software, we both had trouble figuring out how frames and grouping worked, how to make scrolling or have the home page have a “TikTok” scroll lock effect, and overall developing a nice looking and effective app that we were both satisfied with in its appearance and effectiveness.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to prototype our first UI fully by ourselves, despite not being the most familiar with the software beforehand. We were able to animate the screens to even make the prototype interactive.

What we learned

We learned all of Figma as a whole, from creating components and learning how to prototype with them, to something as simple as drawing a shape onto our app’s screen; we fully learned Figma from scratch for this hackathon. Throughout our searches, we also learned a lot about indigenous culture and we were able to educate ourselves more along the way. Moving forward, we’re both looking forward to learning more about how to make better-looking and more user-friendly apps.

What's next for Where Am I?

We’re going to be learning about front-end and back-end code to a high enough degree so that this app will be able to come to life instead of living as a prototype in Figma. Where Am I? Is also looking to build a better sense of community all over Canada with better relationships between the general public and Indigenous communities through popularizing different events and charities that are highlighted in the app and educating more overall.