CurbCast: Real-time bus tracker.We digitize messy whiteboards into a live dashboard. Teachers update slots in one tap so students find their bus instantly. Faster, safer dismissals!
Inspiration: Our project was born from the daily chaos of school dismissal. Every afternoon, we watched teachers scramble to update a dusty whiteboard with bus locations while hundreds of students crowded around, squinting to see their numbers. it was a low tech bottleneck in a high tech world. we realized that if we could move that data to the cloud, we could eliminate the stress, the shouting, and the risk of students missing their rides.
What it does: Curb Cast is a real time logistics bridge between school faculty and the student body. It digitizes the "curb-side" dismissal process by providing a high speed interface for the teachers where they assign bus numbers to specific curb slots and set statuses (Arrived, Loading, or Departed) with single taps. We also have a live student board which is a centralized, auto-refreshing dashboard that students can check on their phones or hallway monitors to see exactly where their bus is parked, eliminating the need to crowd around a physical whiteboard.
How we built it: We built CurbCast using Code.org's App Lab, focusing on a dual interface system. We had the dispatch console for the teacher which was designed for speed, featuring a custom numeric keypad and one tap status toggles. We had a live dashboard for a high contrast student view that reads from a real time database. We also have the backend where we utilized a cloud based data table to ensure that when a record is updated at the curb, it reflects globally across all devices instantly.
Challenges we ran into: The biggest hurdle was network restrictions. Our school's admin settings on Chromebooks blocked external API syncing, which broke our initial Google Sheets integration. We had to pivot mid-hackathon to use internal data tables.
Accomplishments that we're proud of: We are most proud of building the User Experience (UX) where both teachers and students are able to see where the buses are. We designed our app for the real world, creating high contrast visuals for outdoor visibility and oversized touch targets for teachers who are managing a busy parking lot.
What we learned: Beyond coding, we learned the importance of User Experience (UX). we discovered that a good app isn't just one that works, it's one that fits the environment. For teachers, that meant minimizing typing; for students, it meant maximizing visibility.
What's next for Curb Cast: Our vision is to move from a "manual entry" system to a predictive smart campus. We would like to implement GPS. We plan to integrate with the district's bus GPS ping so that slots can be pre-filled automatically as the bus enters the schools "geofence radius. We also would like to implement push notifications. Students will be able to "favorite" their bus number and receive a haptic alert the second their bus hits the curb.
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