Silver Trails

Inspiration

Many hard to find places around campus with no way to find them online. There are many study spots and trails around campus that are difficult to know about unless you explore the campus often. The trails especially could help people because many students assume that the campus takes longer to get around due to not knowing short cuts which leads them to crowd the already insufficient buses which makes transportation just that much worse for disabled students on one of the least disability friendly campuses. We also brainstormed ideas for a way to have an automated orientation app for freshmen and transfers. Lastly, we wanted a way for students to add their own notes around campus to give advice to new students.

What it does

Silver Trails is a campus-specific map that has three different functionalities; a navigation tool, a social platform, and an orientation tool for new students. The navigation tool would allow students to filter through and find spots such as water fountains, cafes, and study spots on campus, as well as an efficient route to get there. A social platform would allow users to make location-specific posts, and create a heatmap of posts that could allow for users to add notes at locations. Lastly, an orientation tool is something that we all agreed would be greatly helpful to new students, in learning about all of the quicks of our beautiful campus.

How we built it

Our app was built using Android Studio, a IDE made specifically for developing Android applications using Java or Kotlin. We used Java because our team all had a decent grasp on it. Tasks were split up such that each person could work on a different aspect of the program, such as the user-interface or a navigable map, and that these tasks could be separated into different git branches to avoid conflicts. After each person contributed a significant feature they would communicate and merge into the main branch, with others could pull. We started with a group brainstorming session where we made as many ideas as we could. We then decided which ideas we liked and chose 4-5 of them. We finally thought about which ones could be combined, and which ones couldn’t have a demo made in one weekend.

Challenges we ran into

The main reoccurring challenge of ours was a lack of knowledge on Android Studio. The first 3-4 hours of our challenge was us just figuring out how to do our respective tasks. For some this was making a UI interface and for others it was spent learning how to use specific parts of the android sdk. This meant that a lot of our major progress happened in the last few hours after we all had the knowledge to use the tools we had spent the previous hours struggling to understand.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The map system that we hobbled together has a lot of the features that we initially had no clue how to do. Some of these things are creating a map that could be zoomed into and out of, moved around while pins remain in place on the map, and pins that could be interacted with to open a pop up. Another accomplishment that many of us are proud of is the ability to much more effectively use many features of git such as working collaboratively with branches.

What we learned

Our team unanimously agreed that our biggest takeaway from this hackathon was gaining experience with using Git, and using it in a team environment. We went into the project with the goal to consistently update our repo, and form good practices such as verbally communicating when we would push or merge to the repository. We also learned all of the hard work that goes into making an app, and the various challenges posed. For example, we realized right off the bat that we couldn’t use a Google Maps plugin because after a certain amount of API requests, it would start charging us — so we set out to make our own. Through challenges and failures such as this, we realized how to quickly adapt and learn new skills to make the best product we could with the resources we had.

What's next for Silver Trails

While we are immensely proud of what we’ve achieved so far, there were so many features that we wanted to add. Starting with location services to show where a user is on the map, we could use find the most efficient path across campus. Adding proper functionality to the community tab would have been great, as we originally planned to integrate Twilio to create a chat room-like feature for the map. Ideally this would have extended to include AR, such that these messages could be virtually displayed at locations. Extending the profile tab to properly include a guided orientation tour is a goal that we agree is attainable and important. Finally, scaling our app up to include a full campus map as well as potentially expansion to other university campuses could have a far larger impact than just the student body at UC Santa Cruz.