Smoggle Maps

Smoggle Maps transforms mobile mapping, offering routes with heightened environmental awareness. Empowering users with environmental impacts, it revolutionizes transportation choices

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Inspiration

Since most of us are from and go to school in Toronto, we've experience first hand the congestion on the highway and in the streets. There are thousands of cars idling and emitting CO2 into the air that we breath. We believe that public and active transportation play a pivotal role in building towards UN's goal of combatting climate change.

What it does

Smoggle Maps is an alternative to Google Maps, intended to help battle CO2 emissions. You can plan a route normally, and select how you're going to travel. Then, Smoggle Maps will show you how many kgs of CO2 you're emitting from your trip based on your mode of transportation! It aims to make you more conscious of your travel choices. Additionally, it shows us just how bad cars are for the environment, as well as showing our leaders that if we want to tackle climate change, we must build expansive transit networks.

How we built it

We were contemplating creating it using React or React Native, but ultimately chose React Native for the iOS and Android support, the platforms we believed most would be using it for. Our first step was to create a design in Figma. We created many frames to visualize how our end product might look like. We utilized XCode and Android studio to emulate a iOS and Android devices, allowing us to design the UI/UX just right. We used JavaScript and React Native to program the app, and Google's Map API to integrate a map and routing system into our app. To stay organized, we used Git/GitHub to collaborate seamlessly.

Challenges we ran into

A consistent challenge we had was rendering our App onto an iOS emulator. React Native load Apple Maps over Google Maps, rendering the API connections useless. A fix for the difficulties was to emulate through an app called Expo Go to run our app through a local host.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of our entire app! The majority of the team was completely brand new to React Native and mobile development, so getting things to work along the way was really impressive for us, let alone an entire app that works (mostly) as we envisioned!

What we learned

  • React Native
  • Google Maps API
  • Git
  • Mobile Development (iOS & Android)
  • Figma
  • Android Studio
  • Expo
  • XCode

What's next for Smoggle Maps

Smoggle Maps is designed to make as much people as possible aware of their carbon footprint, and choose eco-friendly alternatives whenever possible. In the future, we plan to implement a points/rewards system for users to strive for. If they hit their daily goal of saving a certain amount of CO2 emissions, they'll be rewarded. Companies that share our same passion for sustainability and eco friendly environments would be a great partnership for the future as well.

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