Inspiration
Carbon dioxide emissions are leading to devastating problems around the world, such as global warming, which impacts the lives of humans and animals. Every small act leads in a carbon footprint. Simple things like eating a sandwich or going for a walk can have huge unforeseen impacts on a person’s carbon footprint. Thus, we created this app to help people make better choices when deciding what type of transportation to take.
What it does
Our app allows a user to input their starting location and their desired destination. We then use the data the user inputted to identify how many grams of C02 the person will emit if they travel through four different types of transportation: car, bus, walking, biking. We also take into consideration how many people will be on the bus or in the car. When the user sees how many grams of carbon dioxide they are emitting, they will be able to make a well informed decision on which transportation to choose.
How we built it
We used Google Maps API and android studios to build our project. To be more specific, we found efficient routes for cars, buses, biking, and walking using the google maps API and showed these paths on our app. We then calculated the carbon footprint each person would be making for each type of transportation.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into several different challenges. The first one was that we had to learn how to use the Google Maps API. None of us had worked with APIs before, so we spent a good amount of time trying to understand it better. Another challenge we ran into was being able to access the location of our user. We were able to overcome this challenge by researching more about new updates to the Android programming language and helping each other understand each line of code.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
As mentioned earlier, before this hackathon, none of us had any experience using APIs. Through this project, we were all able to understand how APIs work and how to incorporate them into our code in Android Studios. This made us a lot less afraid of trying out new programming techniques.
What we learned
Through this project, we learned how to incorporate APIs into mobile applications. We learned about HTTP get requests, and we learned how to use Postman to model our requests. Additionally, we learned how to interpret the json files from the HTTP requests.
What's next for the project:
For this project, we intend to create carbon footprints for various items that the user might buy. For example, a carbon footprint for food. This way we can inform the users about how their daily life activities affect the environment. Also we plan on including the user’s carbon footprint if they wish to travel by plane.
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