MAPABLE

Awards we would like to be considered for

We would like to be considered for the overall award, the other prize categories, and the Emerging Hackers award.

Inspiration

It all starts with a friend of us. As a freshman at Tech, he fell off his scooter when he went down the freshman hill. With the broken leg bone, the places she used to visit with the scooter took him forever because of the hilly road on campus. Worse, this happened during Hell's week, which only made it harder for him to figure out his way around campus in such a short time.

The Map applications on our phone sometimes recommend the shortest but very steep routes, or maybe it doesn't show whether the route has stairs (which are not wheelchair, crutches - friendly) and that’s the best we can use. We want to help all students that are bothered by the hilly roads to have a better experience on campus.

What it does

MapAble helps users plan out the route that is the friendliest for the way of transportation users choose. A detailed route will be displayed on the map and also in the form of plain text on our website. The routes we give out might not be the shortest but are definitely the easiest for the user to take.

How we built it

We built Mapable using Javascript, HTML, CSS, and React.

We utilized Google’s Maps API, specifically the Direction API, Elevation API to fetch route, elevation points data.

Challenges we ran into

We could fetch JSON data from the Google API from our own laptop, but couldn’t figure out how to integrate the Api Key into our application

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are a team of 4 Emerging hackers, with not much experience with a full stack web development process, so we had to learn everything quickly. We are proud of our innovative idea as well as how we managed to utilize different frameworks in our first hackathon.

What we learned

API interactions, fetching and parsing useful data, and devise a simple mathematical model to justify “efficiency”.

What's next for MAPABLE

In the future, we are going to offer even better solutions by taking weather and availability of bike racks and elevators into consideration. More Importantly, we also want to serve a broader group of people.