Triquetra - Space Apps Challenge

Triquetra| Where There’s a Link, There’s a Way

Where There’s a Link, There’s a Way

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, there has been a proliferation of websites and portals developed to share resources about the topic. Your challenge is to find innovative ways to present and analyze integrated, real-time information about the environmental factors affecting the spread of COVID-19.

VMC – Virtual Memorial of COVID-19

Summary

VMC – Virtual Memorial of COVID-19 is an interactive platform created to help students and researchers comprehend the COVID-19 pandemic and its global impacts. By using safe data sources, like NASA, research institutes, certified organizations, global and local news, it will contribute to the history records and can be used as a learning and searching tool. All that in a quick, visual, flexible, and trustworthy way.

How We Addressed This Challenge

Our team chose the third challenge (#3 “Where There’s a Link, There’s a Way”), that lead us to search for unique ways of displaying and analyzing integrated data in real-time about the environmental factors that affect the spreading of the COVID-19.

The project consists in a virtual museum about the COVID-19 disease, uniting information from the beginning of the pandemic to the present days. It does so by creating a chronological pathway about the main topic, combining the data available about it. It is an interactive platform, that allows the user to surf through a digital timeline. Our product can be used by students and teachers, thus, creating a pedagogical research tool.

Besides complying with the main goal, we believe that our solution is something that can be used by students from all around the world, that were sent home, because of the social isolation policies, that obligated the whole educational system to change in a rapid pace to a distance learning format, with the helping of the internet.

It can also be an opponent to combat fake news, that are a problem everywhere. By only utilizing selected content from a learning tool, we can ease the access to truthful information.

Accessibility features are also planned, providing the same experience for people with disabilities, like the hearing-impaired and the visually-impaired, by supporting special resources like reading out loud, or in the American Sign Language, or the respective sign language used in the country where the website is being used.

We were able to create a project that combines information, lessens the spread of misinformation – like fake news – and delivers a trustworthy and accessible way of getting informed.

How We Developed This Project

We have been inspired by how much scattered information about COVID-19 is in the web, lacking correlation between information in a fast and graphic way to check, and the overall lack of trustworthiness in the information. By creating the VMC – Virtual Memorial of COVID-19 we solved that problem with a timeline, that shows news articles and graphs from the beginning of the global pandemic to nowadays, making it easy to navigate through the information based on point in time selected.

It is different from other websites because our product organizes all the knowledge in a linear way, making it easy to check various scientific studies, even from the beginning of the then known as epidemic.

When designing our solution, we used the Double Diamond design process to come up with this idea. But our team had a hard time figuring our project theme out, because we had different views on the way NASA information could be used. Although these same different views were what made us so persistent in creating a solution that everyone could fight for.

Triquetra, our team name, used these NASA (and partners) data: cumulative confirmed cases, active cases, incidence rate, case-fatality ratio, testing rate, hospitalization rate, climate, water and sanitation, demographic information, urban mobility rate, data curation system, because of the reliable organizations behind them, constant updating and easy to understand the spreading of the disease.

The tools used in the programming of our project were Visual Studio Code, GitHub, Node.js, Express.js and React Native.

Our biggest achievement was working together and being able to experience every part of the process of designing and developing a product. As we said before, we had some different views in the process, but step by step we got on the same page in the end. That was our most proud accomplishment.

Here's our Figma's prototype link:

https://www.figma.com/proto/JzjNII7yiKM9Gk0jGpv7Sx/Untitled?node-id=27%3A120&scaling=min-zoom