purpose
To aid college students in: a) Requesting carpools (to anywhere!) b) Hosting carpools (to anywhere!)
To aid colleges in: a) Providing a cheap, safe transportation mode to students b) Increasing student turnout at events
inspiration
Many international students come here for a short time and don't have any reason to spend a lot of money on a vehicle, but they still need to go places! That fact sparked our interest and initially solving that problem for international students was our primary target, but as we were going through the planning process we realized that even a lot of US-native students don't have vehicles, so the target market ended up being a bit broader. There are several carpooling apps already in existence, but none cover all of the bases as well as ours will.
development
We developed our prototype in Android Studio. We used Firebase for data storage and Google Maps for location services.
challenges
We all had extremely limited experience with app programming. None of us had any experience storing data on a webserver like Firebase. Time constraints. Some team members were using older computers to develop, so running Android emulators was a nightmare. The app was designed in Ionic, but we had a lot of trouble integrating Ionic files with our Android Studio project.
accomplishments
We were very excited at each major milestone of our project. From the first time we saw data syncing from Firebase to our actual smartphones in real-time to the first time we saw our app bring up the Google Maps display, we are very proud of each accomplishment we experienced during development.
what we learned...
We learned so much. We learned how to use Android Studio, how to create app development flowcharts, how to store and retrieve data from Firebase, how to use an actual Android phone for USB debugging, and how to design apps in Ionic and in Android Studio.
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