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Inspiration
Scarpool draws its inspiration from the unique commuter landscape of UTSC. Unlike most universities, a significant portion of our student body relies on transit or personal vehicles to reach campus daily, incurring both financial and environmental costs.
At Scarpool, we recognized this challenge and set out to create a tailored solution, designed to save money and reduce the environmental impact for our UTSC community. Inspired by the success of rideshare apps, we decided to create a specialized, secure, and sustainable platform exclusively for UTSC students.
Our app empowers students to make eco-friendly choices by easily connecting with fellow UTSC peers for shared rides, ensuring cost savings and a significant reduction in carbon emissions while fostering a stronger campus community
What it does
Scarpool aims to provide students who need to spend a long time to commute an opportunity to get a ride from another UTSC student driving to school. Our mobile app avoids hassle of finding a compatible carpool buddy and connects students with similar schedules, ensuring a perfect match for efficient and timely ridesharing
Users will be given the information of all the available drivers nearby, and they can choose a favorite driver.
How we built it
At Scarpool, we've built our app using a combination of cutting-edge technologies to ensure a seamless and efficient user experience. For the front end, we harnessed the power of React Native, utilizing components from the React Native Paper library to create an intuitive and responsive user interface. We integrated Google Maps API to provide users with accurate and real-time mapping, ensuring easy navigation.
On the backend, we employed Node.js as the framework to handle server-side operations, offering the app its robust and scalable foundation. To manage and store data, we turned to MongoDB Atlas, a cloud-based database service known for its reliability and flexibility. Additionally, we integrated Geoapify's API to effortlessly obtain longitude and latitude coordinates for specific addresses, enhancing the precision and efficiency of our app's ride matching and tracking features.
Through this meticulous combination of technologies, we've crafted Scarpool into a powerful, user-friendly, and environmentally conscious carpooling platform, dedicated to serving the UTSC community's commuting needs
Challenges we ran into
Technological Issues
When making Scarpool, we encountered an unusually high number of technical problems. For starters, we had a lot of issues with XCode as it kept crashing and breaking down. We managed to solve our issues but it took a large amount of time. There was also a few issues with connecting front and back end together. For some reason, when we tried to test out our REST API on Postman, it would work. However, the second we tried getting the front end to make API calls to the backend, everything fell a apart.
Not enough time
As mentioned we had a lot of technical issues that took an enormous amount of time to fix. As a result, we were scrambling to finish the front end. What makes it even worse is that only two of our team members could work on the front end because the other two of our members did not have a MacOS laptop.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Being a part of the Scarpool team has been an incredible journey, and we're proud of the achievements we've unlocked in this hackathon. We started with a vision to alleviate the commuting challenges faced by UTSC students, and we successfully translated this vision into a functional, user-friendly app.
Through relentless collaboration and learning, we conquered the intricacies of new technologies like Node.js, MongoDB, React Native, and Postman. Our ability to overcome technical roadblocks and turn them into opportunities for growth was a significant accomplishment.
Moreover, we've learned how to work effectively as a team, leveraging each member's strengths to bring Scarpool to life. While the journey had its share of challenges, we're thrilled to have a platform that can truly make a difference in the lives of UTSC students.
The accomplishments we've achieved in such a short time have ignited our passion to take Scarpool to the next level
What we learned
How to use new technologies
For many of us, Scarpool was a chance to learn how to new tools and technologies such as Node.js, MongoDB, React Native, and Postman. We learned so many things such as how to make a REST API and how to pass information through JSON files. We also figured out how to make API calls in order to get the longitude and latitude from an address.
How to work effectively as a team
While some of us have worked together in the past, we have never worked together in this specific team. Therefore, it was a bit of a challenge figuring out how to work together and how to use each of our strengths to make Scarpool come alive. In the end, we managed to work cohesively through frequent and clear communication and support one another if we encountered any issues.
What's next for Scarpool
Allow users to log in using their UTORID
By making students log into Scarpool using their official UofT accounts, this will minimize the safety risk that all carpooling apps have. Whenever you decide to carpool with a stranger, you always gamble with your safety. While only making Scarpool available to UTSC students doesn't remove this hazard completely, it will gives potential users the peace of mind knowing that their driver is a fellow UTSC student.
Add some sort of incentive for drivers
At this point in time, Scarpool relies on the generous hearts of UTSC students to volunteer themselves as a driver. Doing so, however, could make the drivers pay more for the extra gas they'll need to pick up other UTSC students. Therefore, it would be better if drivers could have some sort of incentive to want to drive other students to UTSC. Possible incentives could be gift cards, cash, etc. We could even allow for passengers to pay drivers for their services at a heavily discounted price so that drivers can make cash on the side while passengers can save more money than using public transit
Add the option of getting a ride back home (+ more variety of destinations)
Currently, Scarpool only supports a one way trip to UTSC, but in the future, we plan on adding more flexibility for students to choose where they want to travel to besides to UTSC.
Add a chat feature
While providing the phone number and email of both the driver and the passenger can suffice, it would be better if all parties could communicate with one another directly through our app so that no personal information needs to be shared unless absolutely required
Adding multiple pick up locations
Due to the difficulty and short time frame of this hackathon, Scarpool only allows for one pick up location which is the address of the driver. If we had more time, we would implement the option of multiple pick up locations by finding the most optimal routes for drivers to take without added too much time on their commute
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