LetUmGrow
You can view the project home page here LetUmGrow Home.
LetUmGrow app started as a final project that was an original idea (we did not want to choose a project in which was a template provided by the professor). I have been wanting to bridge the gap between the Hawaiian culture and technology for a while before I was presented the chance of actually doing it. I was lucky enough to get connected with fellow classmates that wanted to make an app in which involved mapping individual plants and treating them like a separate entity on the map. I have been taking Lāʻau Lapaʻau (Hawaiian Plant Medicine) classes at the University of Hawaii (UH) Manoa as well and wanted to incorporate remedies we have learned in that class into the LetUmGrow application.
We have met with the Heads of Landscaping/Grounds department at UH Manoa and have gained access to there database being that we are leaving our project open sourced. We intend to add functionality that will help the Landscaping/Grounds team keep track of different details about certain plants (when last pruned, by who, soil pH, etc.). This is part of the add plants page shown below.
Each leaf icon on the map is an individual plant entity stored in the Mongo DB using the Meteor Web Framework. All of our collboration was done with Git/Github and it's project management features. We used an 'Issue Driven Project Management' approach, in which issues are defined and set to a certain 'milestone' and it's deadline. This project taught us not only on how to get better at coding and developing a database-backed web application but also how to work together efficiently in a group of programmers.
We also learned how to use Semantic UI to increase the speed and quality of how the front end HTML pages are displayed. The overall design and direction of the app was very much guided by group colloboration so we each added our own creative input into the project. I took on the role of representing the Hawaiian culture in our app with the 'Remedies' page, as shown below
I feel that it is very important to preserve this knowledge of Hawaiian medicine for most of the legitimate knowledge was passed down orally and rarely well documented. Knowledge of these remedies were passed on from Kumu Levon Ohai to Kumu Keoki Baclayon who currently teaches Lāʻau Lapaʻau at several University of Hawaii campuses as of 2016. Hawai'i is a very special place where many people still care about their environment and I intend to try and strengthen that bond through our app. Instead of creating geo-location based 'monsters' (like Pokemon), we want people to engage with plants that actually exist and are producing oxygen for us to breathe! I also worked on several other features of the app, mainly on the front-end, I really enjoyed using Semantic UI and responsible for finding much of the elements that we actually used like the 'UI accordion', 'ui modal', and others. I also took it upon myself to enhance the user-friendliness of the app because I know how frustrating it can be when an app is not well enough documented. I played a big part in putting the LetUmGrow Homepage together, wrote most of the descriptions, and organized the overall flow.
As of right now, you are able to add plants to our map from your current location, add plants to our map via clicking on a different location, edit or remove plants that were already added, and also view all plants added and who added them (via hawaii.edu username). We just implemented the plant profile page, which is where we provide the name of the plant, who added it, its longitude/latitude coordinates, and visual location on the map. This is where we will be implementing many other features to further identify this specific plant (status, growth, harvested, etc.). This is what the plant profile page looks like as of right now.
Future plans for our app include: working with DLNR (Department of Land and Natural Resources) in mapping out plants on Hawai'is hiking trails, working with UH Manoa's Landscaping/Grounds team to help management, possibility of future Lāʻau Lapaʻau students using app to track the plants that they farm. During our ICS 314 class we were given free hosting for deployment through Galaxy from our professor but it is now expired. Our team is still currently working on the app and planning to get a live deloyment of LetUmGrow soon!
You can view the source code here LetUmGrow Repository.