MyRoute

Because it shouldn't be a burden to get to where you need to go.

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Inspiration

Our mission is to build an intuitive web app that makes the campus more accessible and easier to navigate for everyone, regardless of their needs. We aim to help students quickly find buildings, accessible entrances, and essential spaces, creating a more inclusive and connected campus experience.

As three first-year students, we know firsthand how overwhelming it can feel to step onto campus for the first time. Between unfamiliar buildings, unclear entrances, and limited information about accessibility, simply getting from place to place can become a daily challenge. After struggling to find classrooms, study spaces, and accessible routes ourselves, we realized we weren’t alone.

Our mission is to create a web app that makes navigating campus easier, clearer, and more inclusive for everyone. We want to provide reliable information about buildings, accessible entrances, elevators, restrooms, and key spaces so that students of all abilities can move through campus with confidence. What began as a solution to our own freshman-year frustrations has grown into a commitment to building a tool that supports diverse needs and helps every member of our community feel empowered, independent, and welcome.

What it does

MyRoute helps UMass Amherst student navigate the campus easier by providing accessibility routes and features to the user to make the campus a more inclusive one. The user can select a building from the dropdown, in which the left hand side will display the corresponding map. MyRoute will then let the users know how accessible the area is. The app is an open source style, where users can add a "pin" to locations on campus and add details on its accessibility. Others can comment on this pin, and it if reaches 10+ upvotes with no more downvotes than upvotes, then it is officially added as part of MyRoute.

How we built it

This application is built with a React/Vite frontend framework integrated with Firebase in the backend. The application stores the floorplans of various buildings on campus. From this, we were able to extract their accessibility features --- wheelchair accessible, public transit available, a quiet space, etc. We integrated this data into the frontend, where a map displays the selected building. MyRoute then displays the extracted accessibility features to the user.

Challenges we ran into

We had much difficulty with commiting on Github. Many of our files were not tracked and could not be saved. The frontend actually had to be coded twice because of this!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are beyond proud of ourselves for the work we've done in taking a step towards accessibility for all in the community. Though the application is not perfect, it is a step in the right direction and we hope it can be scaled to work better, for more people, and in collaboration with those around us. We are proud to have honed our skills, especially in React, Javascript, web development, backend design, and Firebase.

What we learned

The 3 of us are still fairly new to hackathons. For 1 of us, it was their first hackathon. From this experience, we all collectively learned how to collaborate efficiently on software projects, leverage Github workflows, and utilize good planning to set the tone for the project. This project has helped us learn React for the first time. Additionally, it was a new experience to learn the Vite framework built on top of React. From this project, we also learned how to integrate Firebase backend with frontend applicaitons.

What's next for MyRoute

We would love to expand MyRoute to a larger audience. We would love to make our features available to not just UMass Amherst students, but also to downtown Amherst go-ers, Hadley residents, and eventually the entirety of Massachusetts. Hopefully, with enough momentum, we can expand to the entirety of the United States. There is currently a lack of data for accessibility features in a majority of places, but we hope the open-source "community review" style of the application can help alleviate this issue.

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