Carmates

Nurturing passions, one carpool at a time.

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Inspiration

Growing up, we all saw that our after-school activities were limited due to our parents not always being available to pick us up. In high school, we saw this problem exacerbated as many students we knew could not join clubs, play sports, etc., because of transportation issues. This is an important issue as around the nation, 45 percent of students say they would participate in more school activities if they had the necessary transportation. Our inspiration for this project also came from our first-hand experiences of being restricted from pursuing our passions and interests because of transportation. We do not want this to be the case for future students, as we believe everyone should have an equal opportunity to pursue what they love by making transportation and carpooling in a way that’s more accessible and convenient to all students. We want to provide a way for students to receive free transport from others who choose to help out the community.

What it does

This app allows students to host or join carpool groups based on the event time and location. Students will have the chance to browse a list of carpool groups they can join each day depending on when their after-school activities end and the proximity of carpool members’ houses. The app automatically calculates the distance between your house and the host’s house, and you can only sign up for carpool groups if your house is within a close distance (approximately within 7 minutes) from the host's house. Upon signing up for events, the host will receive an automated message from you, giving the host a chance to create a group chat for further communication about car location, etc. Students also have the option to host their own carpool group to help out the community, in which they will enter how many spots their car has and their time of pick up.

How we built it

We used Thunkable for the main code development and incorporated FireBase, Cloudinary, and RapidAPI. We used Firebase for our login system, prompting user verification through email, and ensuring users' safety. Cloudinary was used to save users' profile pictures in a cloud database. Rapid API was used as a service to find a Distance Matrix API which was used to reference users' house locations (the host's and the respective carpool riders' houses) and calculate travel time between houses.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into several obstacles while developing this app. Living far away from each other and handling different extracurriculars, we found meeting in person difficult. We used a group chat to plan out times we could meet online. We also utilized times in school, like lunchtime, to work on the app. Moreover, we found it difficult to agree upon one idea as we had different perspectives and opinions. Through clear communication, we built off of each other’s opinions to create an app that shared all of our ideas.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

For most of our team, it was the first experience that we had created a working app all by ourselves, with the help of Thunkable, but a new app nonetheless. We were also proud that we were able to create a working solution to a problem that so many people faced for years now. We are also ecstatic that we could do our own passion project and take the first steps toward increasing equality in education. Everyone was also able to learn new skills along the way, and we hope to use these skills in the future for other projects.

What we learned

We learned how to manage our time more effectively, which is very useful in our daily lives. We had to learn to manage time much better due to not living close to each other and each of us having to travel for different activities throughout the timeframe. We also learned how to communicate and brainstorm effectively because of our differing ideas, and ultimately were able to merge our ideas together. Lastly, we learned how our challenges can further our passion for helping the community.

What's next for Carmates

Carmates is currently poised for only after-school activities, but we plan to expand it for weekend events such as community service and sports games/tournaments. We also want to try to incorporate morning carpooling into the app for students to get to school together in one car. Additionally, we are aiming to create a feature to match up long-term carpooling groups for everyday carpooling. As we spread to more schools and counties, we will be able to gather more feedback and further improve our app to better suit the needs of students that use it.

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