getChar | Devpost

Inspiration

Our project is heavily inspired by the STRIPES hotline, which is a hotline that students can call to get a free, safe ride home. The idea as amazing, however, there are many limitations to their call only structure. For example, since STRIPES is serviced by student volunteers, the hours of operation are extremely variable. Unlike STRIPES, getChar allows students to plan safe rides ahead of time, rather than when they may already be in a dangerous situation. As college aged women, assault is an inescapable fact of life around us, so the safety based limitations of STRIPES especially stood out to us.

What it does

getChar is a website where users can sign in with their student ID, and then view lists of free rides that are available at a given time. The drivers are volunteers through the organization STRIPES. Once a user selects a driver, they can view more information about the driver as well as the car. Next, the user can confirm the ride and view the driver's phone number, as well as the car's make and model. From here on out, the communication is off of getChar's hands and between the rider and driver.

How we built it

We chose to use flask for the structure of the programming, allowing us to implement Python, HTML, and CSS to build a website interface. We used Python for the backend of the website, and then referenced CSS into HTML for the frontend design of the site.

Challenges we ran into

Our team had overcome many hurdles throughout the creation of this project. It was all four team members' first time participating in a hackathon. Two of our team members had only ever programmed in C starting three months prior. None of our members had any experience with web development or virtual environments, so learning how to use Python, HTML, CSS, and Flask was all very time-consuming.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The website is functional and cohesive, and we succeeded in learning how to format a web page. Not only did we have front-end, but we also had a bit of back end using python.

What we learned

First and foremost we learned the syntax for three different languages that were new to us. We also learned how to integrate these languages into one platform, using Flask and Github. Another important skillset our team learned was how to collaborate on one project with a whole team.

What's next for getChar

We plan to expand to an iOS app interface to make getting a ride easier for students. As for the website, we wanted to expand on different features, implementing use of databases, as well as making the website more aesthetically pleasing.

Built With

Submitted to

TigerHacks 2022
- Winner 2nd Place: Beginner Category

Created by

I worked on researching different options to use for building a website from scratch, as none of our team members had created a website before. I also learned how to utilize HTML and CSS in Flask to change the design of the site.

kenziemcallister McAllister
I worked almost exclusively on the backend. I used a combination of python, html, & flask to build each of the webpages. I also built the Driver class, which allowed for many variables to be passed from page to page with little code. This was my first time working with html, flask, & css.

Sophia Martin
I worked mostly on developing the website's front-end programming using CSS and HTML. Since none of our team members have had experience with web-designing, I did a lot of the research in learning how to use the syntax and functions for those two languages.

Jessica Xie
I worked on getting Flask and GitHub off the ground, so we could work on one website simultaneously. Once I figured it out with a partner, I learned how to integrate HTML and CSS, with the python back-end code built by my teammates. It is my first time using Flask, Github, HTML, and CSS.

Gabriella Ramirez