Inspiration
The idea behind the creation of this carpooling app rooted from the constant messages sent in the University of Texas at Dallas Mobile App among students who are willing to give a ride to certain students who need a ride. The students who are seeking to find a ride to school, work, or the grocery store either do not have the ability to drive or these individuals do not have the needed commodities in order to get from point A to point B. The DART bus also proves to be an inconvenience by stopping at every spot and therefore elongating the travel time by several minutes. Ergo, why not have them join other students who need to go to the same exact place? Even for a small fare consisting of gas money, Riding 2gether allows comets to save on the extra costs charged by other ridesharing apps while also enabling students to meet each other safely.
What it does
Riding 2gether was created in order to help fellow comets hitch a ride with the convenience of a nearby UTD student driver. The app starts out with a loading page leading into the login or the create a login page; this is where the role of the student is chosen between being a driver or a rider. As the tutorial states, students can then make a post on the feed by either requesting or offering a ride nearby. The driver can then accept the proposal of the rider and state the amount of gas fare needed for the ride (under reasonable terms) or the rider can choose to ride with a certain driver to the location based on the time and date of the proposal. Towards the end of the ride, the rider and driver both have the ability to rate one another; if a certain student falls below the needed average score through reviews, then their account will become banned as a result. Riding 2gether promotes safety and respect among the community of UTD by closely monitoring individuals who choose to use the app.
How we built it
We built this app using react native for the front-end and MongoDB for the back-end.
Challenges we ran into
A couple of challenges faced during HackUTD was trouble shooting simulations and Android emulators, technical issues with equipment, having prior commitments, and the time constraint upon having limited knowledge in the beginning of the creation of this app. The simulations and Android emulators had to be debugged for hours until the code worked for the first part of the app; this cost our team to spend a couple of hours in the beginning of the hackathon to solve this problem. As for the technical issues, the left control key for one of our coders failed within the first five minutes of the hackathon. As well as, one of our team members had prior commitments to participating in intramural basketball games during the middle of the hackathon so they were unable to work on this project for hours. Lastly, the team’s limited knowledge in app creation led to our team having to watch quick tutorials in the beginning of HackUTD
Accomplishments that we're proud of
While there were many challenges faced during the hackathon, the accomplishments made will further our team to have app creation knowledge for the future. This was our first app all of us have ever created in entirety. One of our coders efficiently integrated email authentication and JSON web tokens as part of the back-end of the program and the front-end coder successfully learned about website navigation from this project.
What we learned
Overall, all four of us came out from this hackathon with newfound knowledge. This challenge enabled us to learn about the creation of a login page, website navigation, JSON web token middleware, and the use of FIGMA in order to design the app separately.
What's next for Ride 2gether
While our team may have not finished this project entirely to our liking, we will continue to pursue this project until everyone is satisfied with how our first app has developed.
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