HACC 2020 1st Place Winner
This fall, I entered the 2020 Hawaii Annual Code Challenge (HACC) with three of my software engineering classmates: Eric Lam, Alyssandra Cabading, and Irene Ma. Together we formed Team OverEasi. HACC is a unique hackathon that takes place over the course of a multi-week timeframe in order to encourage teamwork. Each participating team is required to select a sponsored challenge and develop a community driven, sustainable solution. My team chose to undertake the NIC Hawaii COVID-19 Chatbot challenge.
With COVID-19 information constantly changing and scattered across several websites, it may be hard for the whole community to stay up to date. Our goal as a team was to create a solution that would consolidate the COVID-19 information in one place. We wanted our chatbot to be easy to access, effective, and above all flexible. We felt that flexibility was the key to developing a sustainable solution in the long run. We were able to accomplish this in two ways. The first was that we gave admin users view, add, remove, and edit functionality with the regards to our collections. This would allow admins to easily control and update the information that our chatbot would be delivering to the community. The second way is that we have the ability to receive quick user feedback through our reports system. We feel that it is important to be able to swiftly address any problems that our users encounter while using our application. Our chatbot will be able to quickly disperse specific and beneficial information to the public which will help everyone to do their part in ending this pandemic.
We primarily used three software developing tools: Meteor, MongoDB, and Google Dialogflow. Meteor allows us to instantly update and refresh data across clients while MongoDB provided us with an easy way to store and manipulate data in collections. Google Dialogflow was the key to communicating with users thanks to its built in text parsing capabilities. Eric and Irene worked mostly on the backend of our application using Dialogflow. Alyssandra and I worked on the frontend side of the project. Alyssandra focused on the reports feature while I worked on the ability to update our collections.
After presenting our chatbot application in front of a panel of judges and the governor of Hawaii, we ended up winning first place overall and took home the grand prize of $4,000. On top of this, participants and audience members voted on all of the applications that were presented on judging day, and our team won the People’s Choice Award for this year’s HACC. This was a pretty incredible experience as it was my first big coding project outside of the scope of my courses and the university. I really learned a lot about not only coding, but what it looks like to be a part of a software development team in a remote setting during these times.
YouTube demonstration video: Click Here