Sting.

Inspiration

How many times have you forgotten your BuzzCard at your dorm? Forcing your BuzzCard into a phone sleeve? As technology continues to become integrated into our daily lives, we often find ourselves becoming more conscious and aware of the presence of these mobile technologies. Companies and banks have realized the incentive of digitizing common identification and payments. Driver's Licenses, employee IDs, and barcodes are all identification mediums that have been added to the digital landscape.

What it does

We seek to digitize BuzzCards without compromising student information and data security. STING. is a mobile application intended to provide convenience and accessibility for Georgia Tech students.

How we built it

We built the project using the Unity Engine. Through the use of Plastic SCM, cloud storage was reached, so we could share our changes in real-time as we all tackled different aspects of the project. We implemented all of our code in C# where a sample database of GT students and their data was created to test out our project. Ultimately we focused our project to work on Apple devices due to the functionalities of Apple Wallet.

Challenges we ran into

We faced several technical and general challenges throughout the process of Sting's development. The main theme of an issue that we kept running into was the problem of money. We kept encountering paywalls when it came to developing freely with XCode and swift or allowing all of our group members to work collaboratively on unity because of a 3-person restriction on the free version. Despite, the challenges we persevered past them, being innovative and creative when it came to efficiently spending our time toward our goal. We also came into several stumps, and in those times we reached out for help, watch many, many videos, and took a rest when we needed it. We learned that sometimes a fresh perspective aided in simplifying complex problems. Overall, the hackathon taught us a lot through these hardships.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to accomplish many different goals for this project. We created an application that satisfies a genuine need in our community. Moreover, we are proud of the aesthetic of the project as it is our first time designing UI/UX. Our team was able to adapt to the many difficulties we faced regarding pay walls and lack of resources. We persevered to finish the product. We stuck together, and finished our first hackathon!

What we learned

During this project, we had several major learning curve stages. One of the biggest things we learned in this project was to always aim high with our project idea and to fully flesh out all of our ideas. The more possible ways we can better our project, the better right? We began our project Sting by having several ideas which required computing and time that were far beyond what we could have accomplished in our given time. However, keeping sight of what we can do helped us better what we were doing, to be able to add even more features to our project. More specifically, our entire team became more well-versed in the use of Unity, creating our entire app in the project. Lastly, we learned that most of the time, for apps like we are creating, there are often paywalls we need to get past. Therefore, for lower-budget projects, we should try to shy away from these projects.

What's next for Sting

As we look towards the future, we know there are many ways to enhance our application. A massive concern with any digital form of transaction has always been security, and with Sting, we plan to implement history logs within the app to keep track of transactions/ general card authorizations, we also plan to implement facial detection software to enhance security when logging in. Of course, like many other universities, Georgia Tech being the next, we plan to expand our program to other universities.

Built With

• c#
• unity