Cogo helps people escape the dangerous loneliness of social isolation while utilizing the benefits on human dependency on technology. By allowing users to chat and learn from peers with similar interests while playing trivia, Cogo facilitates a fun, learning-filled experience for users to get away from the boredom created by social isolation. In addition to that, it also keeps users up to date on recent developments in regards to space and covid-19, which encourages them to take necessary precautions.
Our team is mostly comprised of high schoolers. As a result, we were seeing the strains of social isolation take a toll on ourselves and our peers. One of the most noticeable effects were the drastic increases in time spent on things such as social media, video games, and Netflix. These things were resulting in the formation of damaging behaviors such as sleeping as late as 5-6 AM and waking up well past noon. Due to these things, we were inspired to try and harness the aspects of technology that were causing disruption and damage during social isolation to create happiness and growth.
When reading about NASA's tips for living in isolation in space, we found that the concepts of communication and teamwork stuck out to us. This inspired us to want to create a mobile app that served the dual purpose of being enabling communication and collaboration. Our further interest in space data led to the development of 2 spaced themed-solutions, an AR app for group stargazing in light-polluted areas, and a competitive trivia app. We ended up going with the competitive trivia app as we were relatively inexperienced with hackathons and wanted to pursue a more feasible application. After further thinking about this app, we realized that we had the opportunity to do something unique and much more beneficial for social isolation by making users work together rather than against each other. That is how we came up with our app cogo (which means 'get together' in Latin).
Our first major accomplishment was creating python scripts to interact with NASA's APOD dataset and image dataset to find ways to generate questions. This program was deployed as a flask API on Heroku and took in a set of categories and corresponding keywords. It would then randomly chose a group and a subset of the keywords to create a question and answer choices. Then it searched Nasa's image API for an image portraying the correct answer. We also created a web scraper to provide further information on a topic, but we never got to use it. Although the program worked decently well, we were still somewhat dissatisfied with the level of questions provided and the fact that there were sometimes unrelated pictures. However, this was one of the more manageable essential tasks, so we moved on to the more challenging ones. If we had more time, we probably would have integrated more datasets (Mars rover images) and provided a wider variety of questions (perhaps exploring Earth data) that provided tests beyond just identification. On the other hand, one of the significant difficulties we had was dealing with the database, multiplayer functionality, and app UI. Our group had little experience with developing apps and databases. This was made even harder when developing an app where users interacted with each other in real-time. Despite this, we were able to create a working login/sign-up page and trivia app UI in addition to making partially working matchmaking and chat functionalities. Given more time, we would have like to have connected these different aspects of our app and refined our database manipulation.
Concept Video:
https://youtu.be/UOsE3_cP5jI
Trivia-Only Web Demo:
https://awesome-spence-4490e9.netlify.app/#/
NASA API Library (https://api.nasa.gov/):