For a long time, many students have been trying to perfect TAMU Bus Routes, a website that gives you information about all the buses.
It felt strange and counterintuitive that there was no website even similar to it for micromobility.
TAMU campus is the largest in Texas, and even the United States.
Thus, people have used micromobility such as:
Bikes
Scooters
Skateboards
The use of micromobility also came with new issues:
Rough TAMU roads
Near misses and safety concerns from both pedestrians and micromobility users themselves
Crowded sidewalks
Elevation changes
The Learning Process
Throughout the development of Skate Scout, our learning process had a mix of both software, user research, and data testing.
We began by identifying the core problem: campus congestion and limited micro-mobility options.
Conducted informal surveys among Aggie students to understand common skating routes and obstacles.
Learned how to model the Texas A&M campus as a weighted model, assigning dynamic edge penalties for rough terrain, hills, and congestion using real-time and crowdsourced data through submission reports.
On the frontend, we worked on UI/UX principles to create a visually clear, Aggie-themed interface optimized for quick readability.
Integrating data points from the user’s report on various parameters of the road pushed us to learn how to process raw data to generate a meaningful “Smoothness Score.”
Additional data points such as bike racks and construction zones were added to account for external factors.
The model generates multiple route choices for users based on these scores, ranging from the shortest route to the safest one.
Testing and refining the model through real skate sessions taught us how to:
Calibrate weights
Improve accuracy
Balance route speed versus comfort
Overall, the project taught us to merge engineering with empathy — designing technology rooted in both data and real campus life.
The Building Process
The building process for us was a modulated process.
This allowed us to ensure that we could continue to stack new features and future developments onto our project.
We split each of the group members into different roles and responsibilities, giving each person a different feature and allowing each active member to work on a design simultaneously.
This allowed us to speed up the design process and gave each of us enough time to complete the project with satisfactory results.
We used GitHub to manage our code, giving us the ability to share changes with each other and revert changes when things went poorly.
This further improved our productivity.
We communicated with each other when new changes were made and tested each other's code to ensure that there were no bugs.
Challenges We Faced
Finding free online APIs that we could use
Extensive research to find APIs
Conflicting project ideas
Slowed down the decision process and made sure each decision would be beneficial to the final product
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