Inspiration
Currently, Five College students post and request rides in a Facebook group, but this group has become very busy and incredibly unorganized. We thought it would be very beneficial to create an app that would allow users to enter the trip they are already making, or the ride they need and store those in an organized way that would allow other users to actually see the posts or requests relevant to them. Our app will match drivers with passengers - and vice versa - based on destination, location, date/time, and preferences.
What it does
Our app allows users to either post or request a ride. Once a user requests a ride, they are shown a list of possible compatible rides based on their destination, location, date/time, and preferences. For each ride, there is a button that allows the user to contact the driver. When a user posts a ride, they enter their email so they can be contacted by passengers.
How we built it
We used Android Studio and Java to create our app. We are storing our data in HashMaps and TreeSets.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into a lot of problems with pushing and pulling between our two computers - it seems we have different versions of Android Studio running that are causing a lot of issues just with sharing the project. We also realized we need to use something like Firebase to store the data users input - currently, this information doesn't last outside the activity it's created in.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud of ourselves for coming to our first hackathon and getting this far in such a short time.
What we learned
Through this project, we got a lot more experience with Android Studio and GitHub. We also learned the importance of planning ahead.
What's next for RideShare
We plan to use Firebase to store our data, implement our method for selected compatible rides, and create the concept of users, so users can look at and edit their posted rides, have profiles, etc.
