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How to help firefighters with Geofencing map app…
Hello, my name is Jermaine. I am the team leader of FireTamer, our team is determined to build an application to get firefighters notified of fires to shorten the response time and extinguish the fires quickly. We are a team of 4 enthusiastic and dedicated middle and high schoolers.
My teammates, Ray, Bruce, Alex, and I enjoy challenging ourselves by learning new things in the field of STEM and are passionate about contributing to the community in solving difficult problems with our newfound knowledge. Thanks to ACF’s teen startup program, we were able to gather and coordinate this entrepreneurship that we started 6weeks ago.
Currently, our team has been working on our foundation coding knowledge needed for the project and researching what features our application should have. In the beginning first weeks, we created a base idea for what the application should do. Our mentors introduced the idea of geofencing to us, and we came up with the innovative idea to have firefighters draw out the field/location of the fires, which would send the coordinates of the area to the database for further processing. We also came up with the idea to utilize wind speeds and direction to predict and warn people in the area to evacuate and stay safe. Having different color codes depending on how severe the fires are something we wanted to implement as well. Based on the average intensity level the firefighters highlighted at a certain point on the map, we can increase the fire intensity. Firefighters would choose that level after circling an area on the map.
In recent weeks, we have been creating a presentation for our project, as well as learning how to use document schemas and APIs to create small applets to send and receive information from databases.
As a new team, we have faced some challenges during our beginning sessions. For instance, the only people that knew each other were Bruce and Alex, hence, we were relatively shy during our beginning conversations and didn’t get many ideas across to each other. Team building with the same goal was hard but was becoming easier as weeks go by. After 6weeks, we are starting to loosen up, and we are working well and swiftly than at the beginning palpably. Another challenge we faced was not knowing how or where to start for our application. Thankfully, our ACF coach and other staffs were able to guide our conversations strategically so that we could figure out the steps to get started. They also gave us resources to look into for help in creating the applets. In the next 5 weeks, we plan on strengthening our software skills and developing our entrepreneurship, finishing up our presentation, and reaching out to a firefighter to get tips on some good features of applications that are currently in the app. stores, and what are some must-haves in our own program.
We will continue working hard on our applets and will look into geofencing APIs and other free resource APIs. We can’t wait to create our first version of our FireTamer application, stay tuned!
