Inspiration
There are so many places on UMass campus that serve food or drinks with compostable containers, but how many compost bins are actually on campus? And where are they? If I'm at the rec center, where's the nearest gender-inclusive restroom? What if I'm looking for a good group study spot near Northeast? So many amenities on campus are hard to find... not anymore!
What it does
Campus Compass is a web-based app, which we also ported to iOS. Campus Compass uses crowd-sourced data allowing you to share and find free-use facilities on campuses that would not be listed on a typical map app.
How we built it
We built this project as a Mapbox-based campus mapping app where users can add amenities directly on the map and classify them with details like amenity type, indoor/outdoor, floor, and description. We also added touchscreen-friendly interactions, category filtering, and location-aware behavior so the app works smoothly on mobile and in a WebView.
Challenges we ran into
One of the bigger challenges we ran into was sorting out how we wanted to store the markers. At first they were simple markers on the map with just the type of amenity, but then we realized there's so much more we could add to each marker, redirecting us to reinvent our markers as objects that could have as many attributes as we needed, such as whether or not it was indoors, or even what floor of the building it's on if it's indoors.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Setting up and getting started with MongoDB was challenging, but it felt very rewarding once everything came together, and we were able to see our work come to fruition and have an actual functioning app that was storing data correctly and having that data populate every time we restarted our app. I'm also super proud of our ability to port this web app to iOS using Xcode and Swift.
What we learned
We learned a ton about web development and APIs among other things. Git was also a huge plus, and we became a lot more familiar with common git commands. We also learned how to link MongoDB with our app which is a game changer.
What's next for Campus Compass
Hopefully we will have more time to work on this project, and if that's the case, we'd like to have more crowd-sourced data across the world so our app can help those who need it, and are unfamiliar to certain areas!
Future Additions:
- Add photos to posts, improving ease of finding amenities beyond the user-written descriptions
- User profiles, Admin vs. User privileges
- Ability to join specific campuses
- Enhanced posting/filtering options, ex) by campus, by building, by status (free vs. paid, functioning vs. in repair)
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