ArtQuest Seattle
ArtQuest Seattle is an online scavenger hunt incorporating a map and list of objectives derived from Seattle's OpenData APIs that list public artworks in the city collection. The user can create an account that stores one or more quests that are subsets of the entire list of public art. The locations are displayed on a map, and when the user is in the vicinity of one of the artworks, they can check it off their list.
Create a Quest
You can create a new quest, or list of public artworks in several ways. The 1-day and 2-day challenge create a random list of 10 and 20 items pulled from the artwork database. Or you can use your current location to create a list with a set number of objects or within a certain distance, or similarly from a specific address.
Interactive Checklist
The list of artwork on the current quest is sorted by distance from your current location, and you can only mark items on the list as visited when you are sufficiently close to them.
Map View
The map view shows where all the different artworks are located in the current quest along with the users current location.
Contributions
I pitched the initial concept of doing a location-based scavenger hunt, which was subsequently modified to fit the project parameters of incorporating an API for data access and being community focused. We adapted our mission to support Seattle's visitors and residents in getting better acquainted with Seattle's excellent collection of public artwork.
My specific contributions were in the areas of project definition and management, firebase integration, location-based services and pair-programming support of the rest of the team with specific challenges and issues. I also acted as git-master and managed pull requests and merge conflicts and project deployment.
I navigated a team-member through firebase auth integration and trouble-shooting and subsequently implemented the rest of the database access for storing lists of objectives (artwork locations). After saving and retrieving random lists of objectives was working, I used a library for calculating lat/long distances to enable creating objectives based upon distances from the users current location or a specified address. I also worked closely with each of the other team members with trouble-shooting and working through various challenges (firebase integration, page routing, deployment bugs, handlebars issues and css/html tweaks.
Technology
The ArtQuest Seattle website was built primarily with vanilla javascript, html and css. Firebase was used for storing the user data, user accounts and authentication and for deploying the website. Page.js was used for simple client-side routing. handlebars.js for presenting formatted data. Google maps and browser location services and a math library for calculating distances between locations. Seattle OpenData api for database entries.
The project used GitHub for source management and can be found here: https://github.com/tanyaweaver/artquest-seattle
Process
ArtQuest Seattle was the final group project for my Intermediate Software Development course at Code Fellows in Seattle. The basic process was for students and instructors to pitch a variety of ideas and vote on them. The top ideas were assigned teams of four people and we worked on it for four days, followed by a presentation. My fellow team members were Tatiana, Jeremy and Tre.