How were we inspired
My friends and I all have our own personal experiences of arriving late at the airport. However, the incident that inspired us to make this program came when I missed my flight to Colorado for Christmas. My family completely underestimated the time required to get through traffic, much less TSA during the height of the holiday season. It forced us to cut our trip down to a measly 2 days and bummed us out significantly. This experience encouraged us to find a solution, and thus, we created Gotta Go.
What it does
The goal was to create an app that determines a final Estimation time of Arrival for your flight taking factors such as, proximity, traffic, and seasonal airport trends into account. With this ETA, you will know how much time to allocate for getting through the airport.
How we built it
The app operates primarily through the APIs provided by Google Maps, and venue maps API provided by HERE. This allows us to efficiently determine your location, where your destination is, and the fastest route to get there. Next, in order to narrow down the calculated ETA, we operate a database with the impending flights in the case of a delay or a cancellation.
Challenges we ran into
The primary challenge our group faced was implementing the Google Map APIs, as it seemed many instructions to do so were out-of-date or simply flawed, however, we were able to overcome this challenge and get Google Maps Operational in Gotta Go. We also experienced struggles finding a useful source with impending flights and TSA wait times.
Accomplishments that we’re proud of
We are most proud of implementing Google Maps into an app of our own, something that none of us have attempted beforehand. Our group is also gratified with our successes in converting an airport code into its address and thus determining the ETA there from your current location. Going from Airport code ie. IAH, to the address, was very complicated
What we learned
We learned the importance of communication between team members. We had little experience working with others for a code project. We saw the consequences of this as we found our code very unorganized and all over the place. It took us a long time to catch up with each other and figure out how to improve.
What's next for Gotta Go
In the 24 hours, we accomplished the main goal of calculating an ETA based on your proximity to the airport, and the fastest routes there. However there is significant room, and reason, to improve. For example, we came close to factoring into the ETA projected TSA waiting times, and having this will certainly allow us to grow the accuracy of the ETA we recommend. Most importantly, however, our group understands the benefits this app will provide, and for this reason we are strongly eng=couraged to grow and develop Gotta Go further.
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