Carbon e-Race

Home Screen Carbon e-Race
Food Screen Carbon e-Race
Travel Screen Carbon e-Race
Travel Screen with Input Carbon e-Race
Travel Screen with Map Carbon e-Race
Leaderboard Screen Carbon e-Race
Settings Screen Carbon e-Race
Central Footprint Symbol
e-Race Mascot

Inspiration

This year, all our team members were young; young enough be first years. It was intimidating for us to enter a hackathon for the first time, and deciding to attend already felt like a leap of faith. When deciding what track we wanted to, we noted that there was a plethora of options available for the connectivity and community track; especially since COVID 19 inspired new technologies to keep communities together and people connected. However, we opted for the environment track. Since we were already taking a big jump, we might as well think big. We figured that if we were to learn and encounter such a steep learning curve, we should make the struggle purposeful and find ways we can help solve a worldwide problem that will always have room to improve in. At the end of the day, preserving our environment will hold true as one of the most crucial problems for as long as Earth is around, and we felt like DubHacks was the perfect opportunity to contribute a new idea that will motivate others to preserve the environment. Each member of our group is passionate about the environment, and that was something we bonded over as some of us made the transition to the UW.

What it does

Carbon e-Race allows users to track their daily carbon footprint while competing in friend leagues that allows them to see how their daily score compares to those of their friends. It provides these services in an intuitive and smooth way, therefore enhancing the user experience.

How we built it

We utilized Android Studio to develop the core pages and connections for our app. We then heavily used the Google Cloud Platform APIs to integrate Google Maps and distances into our application. Lastly, we used a lot of online resources to learn all the essential Android packages that we had to use, allowing us to create a truly transformative user experience.

Challenges we ran into

Learning Android Studio was a challenge as everyone in the group had minimal experience going into DubHacks. The team was able to work hard and collaborate to self-learn the platform in less than 24 hours, all while implementing core features. We also faced initial difficulties with connecting to the Google Cloud Platform APIs, but we were able to resolve these difficulties through a lot of hard work and grit. We are thankful of these challenges for providing us the opportunity to learn and achieve significant personal growth.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of successfully completing our project, which at first seemed like a daunting task with many moving parts. We are also proud of the teamwork and collaboration throughout the project, allowing work to be done smoothly with little redundancy.

What we learned

We all learned much more about Android Studio and Java, as well as how to call Google Cloud Platform APIs. We also learned much more about app design as a whole, including how to design user interfaces and constrain layouts. We finally also learned a lot about what it means to develop software with a purpose.

What's next for Carbon e-Race

We intend to continue this project until completion and eventual deployment. We will optimize parts of the code that were done quickly due to the timed nature of the hackathon, and we will add complexity to certain pieces of the application. We intend to perform more rigorous app testing in order to find even more ways to improve the app. We hope that we are able to make a truly immersive experience for everyone around the globe to reduce their carbon footprint, all while having a fun time competing.