Translution | Devpost

Inspiration

As a group of college students on a budget, we know firsthand the difficulty in finding both affordable and efficient transportation. Cars are necessary to travel nearly anywhere -- from the library to the pharmacy to grocery store and the gym -- yet come at a high cost for the average student. Public transportation, then, is the obvious choice. However, bus routes and DART schedules prove difficult to remember for even the most seasoned public transport frequenters. How then, can we assist those in choosing the best transportation for their idiosyncratic needs?

What it does

Translution is a web application designed to access user's transportation needs. The user participates in a survey encompassing both quantitative (i.e. expenses/budget) and qualitative (i.e. location, environmental concerns) factors and the application offers a suggestion as to how the user might proceed. The user can also track their previous routes in "History" so they know exactly which method of transportation they can use to get to certain locations. This way, they can learn to navigate public transportation and improve their transportation efficiency in the future.

How we built it

We created a React-App and a frontend featuring a landing page, a survey page, and a history page. We primarily used JavaScript, HTML, and CSS to design each page.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into several merge conflicts when familiarizing ourselves with GitHub.
We had some issues with parsing the answers from the user
We had some issues with removing the highlight from an unselected answer

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were all beginners (for two of us, it was our first hackathon!) but took on the challenge of learning a relatively difficult framework in a short amount of time.

What we learned

We learned how to work with React.JS, CSS, GitHub (version control), and attempted to implement a simple backend that would parse the survey answers to produce a result.

What's next for Translution

In the future, we'd like to expand Translution to include more questions (we were limited by the time) to create a more accurate prediction/assessment system. We'd also like to be able to parse data for certain car models that could be used to suggest purchases for the user. We would also like to have a map to allow users to visualize their paths. Finally, we'd also like to add user authentication and allow users to register their certain car models, and their most recent maintenances. This way, users could also use this app to market their cars for sale or determine when it's time to repair/upgrade. We'd also like to make it available for mobile users.