Badger Pool

Inspiration

Going to the Madison airport is a 30 dollar Uber ride from campus - a big amount for just one person to pay. Especially when there are a lot of other students who may also be catching a flight from the airport around the same time, paying the same amount of money for an Uber. We made this app to make that process more efficient. By finding a rider who is going to the same place as you at a similar time, both people can save money by splitting the cost.

What it does

This app lets people begin by adding a Solana wallet. They also have to verify their student status by putting a valid wisc.edu email. Then, all students who got verified are able to post or find rides. When they accept a ride, it immediately takes them to their Solana wallet where they can either confirm the payment and pay up front, or they can cancel and find a different ride. Users cannot accept their own ride and they cannot accept a ride if they have insufficient funds in their wallet.

How we built it

We built it using vibe coding and cursor. We told cursor our instructions and if any errors occurred, we fed it back and asked what we could do to fix those problems.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges we ran into was using cursor initially. Neither of us had any experience with cursor, so we didn't realize how specific we had to be in giving our prompts. That led to a lot of issues that we had to fix by hand, making the process very time consuming.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of figuring out how to use Solana wallet, since we didn't know how it worked before but we were able to implement it into our program which was new.

What we learned

We learned a lot about block chain and what it is and the applications of it. We learned that it could help us create a decentralized funding system within our app, and why it is useful (anonymous to public so more secure).

What's next for Badger Pool

Next steps for badger pool would be to allow ride posters to also post how many seats they have available in their ride. Right now only one user can accept the ride and they pay exactly half the price immediately, but my adding more possible riders they would only be able to pay right after the ride which would be different.