Smile Miles

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Welcome to project SmileMiles, created by Joseph Wong, Sherwin Zhang, Olivia Lassa, and Henry Lassa. To illustrate the intended purpose and real-life applications of this, we’ve constructed an informational video, located here. We will be entering our project under the Traffic category, as our project intends to improve not only the safety of teenagers commuting to school, but also make the experience more enjoyable. Coming from the Monta Vista Area, many of the members of our team have come in contact with the horrendous and very dangerous traffic associated with the school commute hours. Often times, the traffic will get so backed up that an announcement via P.A. will ask teachers to allow an extra 10-15 minutes before marking students late. This cuts into educational time, not only hindering the progress of the students arriving later, but also severely limiting the material presented to the entire class. By enacting a program that is essentially a rideshare, and narrowing the service to students and parents of students, the amount of vehicles on the road will be reduced, cutting down on the traffic and preventing chronic tardiness. Our application features an interactive networking system that will allow users to form carpool groups based on need, common neighborhood origin, and/or common destination. With a two-step verification required from both parties(the driver and the one being driven), our system hopes to establish a safe and secure way to reduce strain on working families (where one or more parents may be leaving the house to go to work before the child leaves for school) and encourage neighborhood camaraderie, getting any and every student to school on time. In the making of our project, we utilized Android Studio, and worked in collaboration with Google Maps API and Android SDK. The primary languages used to code our project were Java and XML. The only other library we used was the SCCL. To say that we accomplished such a task without problems would be false. In the beginning, Android Studio proved to be a finicky mistress, and much time and effort was siphoned into efforts to even initially download the program. Once installed, basic formatting/syntax errors did hinder our progress, and at the ripe hour of 2:00 in the morning, we felt that our efforts may have been fruitless. We did, however, manage to overcome these obstacles, and above all, we learned that good code does not only come from having all of the knowledge of the language and syntax; it comes from being able to persevere and overcome any and all obstacles in your path. We may have all improved our programming proficiency, but the importance of that lesson should not be considered adjunct.