Carpool

A web-based social media app that encourages the community to carpool with neighbors in an effort to reduce their carbon footprint.

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*This project won "Best Impact Hack" at Sego Lily Hacks, but the banner won't show up.

Inspiration

Carbon emissions are on the rise with the start of another summer season; millions of people continue to take vacations and road trips around the world. The average passenger vehicle emits 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. Most people are too busy to spend time biking or walking to their favorite locations. So how can people lower their carbon footprint? Carpooling!

What it does

Carpool is a community web application that allows people to carpool with their friends and colleagues for their daily trips, whether it's a planned vacation or simply running errands. Every user has their own account, where they can choose to be public or private. Private accounts only show scheduled trips to mutuals on the site. When creating a trip, the user enters in the starting location, destination, and timings. This information is shown to other people on the site who are looking to carpool. Users can search for destinations and are shown all available carpools that are going to the same or nearby areas, (with the times). They can choose to request a carpool with any of these people, and wait to be accepted or rejected. The app also notifies you of all your friends' scheduled trips.

How we built it

Our first step was prototyping the web application and figuring out the design elements. This includes color schemes, design principles, fonts, etc. We built the entire base structure of the application using HTML, and went on to format it using CSS. We were then able to incorporate JavaScript into the web application for user interactivity. Most of the files needed to be converted into PHP format to be able to work with databases for the back-end.

Challenges we ran into

We're all programmers that mainly have back-end experience, with languages like Java or Python. This project was heavily front-end based, which made it very challenging for us from the start. We had a lot to learn about working with HTML and CSS. Additionally, we ended up splitting the front-end work from the back-end to try to finish things faster. This didn't go as planned because we spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to combine the HTML/CSS/JS with PHP.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the aesthetically pleasing user-interface we managed to create, along with the connection between the website and database, despite our severe lack of web-design experience. We are proud that we got this far, and the product is something we can be proud of.

What we learned

This project was a stellar learning experience. We learned much on the nuances of HTML/CSS coding, general language compatibility, elements of good web design, website back-end connections, JS in websites, and database connection and maintenance.

What's next for Carpool

We hope to add better profile and friend functionalities using the back-end database. Additionally, we'd love to implement more with the Bing Map API, for example, having multiple stops in one trip.

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