Kapool!

Inspiration

We are team Darkmoon, today we bring our project KaPool: Carpool made easy, which is our solution to move toward our goal of being sustainable, by strengthening the community around it. Our team is made of people who are taking transit, and people who are driving cars. We all have our first-hand or second-hand experience with carpool, and we all believe that carpool should not be so hard to manage. To understand why carpooling is important, why can inspect it's alternatives: Transit:

• Transit required walking. Even in shady neighborhoods, or harsh weather.
• Transit takes more time since there's multiple destinations
• Transit can some time be dangerous. most people are nice, but times things happen that make us reconsider

Car:

• Large carbon footprint
• Car contributes to traffic
• Can be costly to maintain

We belive carpooling solve that problem.

What it does

Carpool is our solution to simplify the process of finding and managing your carpool. Using a user-friendly interface with smart features that automate complicated tasks of joining/hosting a carpool, route planning, and gas sharing. Reducing your living costs is also a plus.

KaPool is special because

• We allow you to easily search for a carpool that matches your timeline and destination of interest
• Automate route planning to get the fastest route, including start time, pick-up location, and pick up time for each member.
• Visualization of the route right on the app
• Estimate extra cost, time, and distance whenever a person wants to join a carpool
• Allow you tips your carpool host as a token of appreciation
• Foster a community around carpooling, you can be friends with your carpool partners
• Provide incentives so more people can live sustainably, while reaching their saving goal

How we built it

We built the front end using React and Typescript. The backend is a dotnet server that connect to our sqlite database. We use Postman to automate testing and use excalidraw to plan out sketches.

Challenges we ran into

In the development process of our app, Kapool, we encountered several challenges that demanded innovative solutions. Crafting an ideal website page presented hurdles, especially in achieving precise adjustments in size and color concentration for a seamless UI/UX. Integrating the appropriate API for map implementation and real-time calculations posed complexities, requiring a thorough understanding of the return object file to extract and integrate accurate data into the app. Designing the database proved to be another significant challenge, demanding careful consideration of how to structure it to seamlessly support the app's functions. These challenges have been instrumental in refining our approach, pushing us to find creative solutions to ensure the optimal performance and user experience of Kapool.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have navigated challenges, acquiring new skills and knowledge in the process, and are particularly gratified by our ability to contribute both social and sustainability value through the development of Kapool. Our accomplishments reflect our commitment to making a positive impact on the community and the environment.

What's next for Kapool

Future of Kapool

• Choose the path that minimizes carbon emission (limited by our api)
• Allow dropoff in between locations, so more people can join.
• Please reach out to us if you are interested. We are very enthusiastic about KaPool and we are open for suggestions.

Built With

• dotnet
• gcp
• react
• sqlite
• typescript