Teen Tracker

Your child driving a car is terrifying. Utilize Teen Tracker to keep an eye on their driving habits and location.

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Inspiration

All members of Teen Trackers received their learners permit within the last year. While learning how to drive we've all noticed how much our parents worried about our safety. We designed this app to provide millions of parents everywhere with peace of mind by knowing where their children are and knowing how fast their children drive. This will allow parents to have more discussions with their children about safe driving

What it does

Teen Tracker is split up into two parts, the parent side app and the child side app. After their children sign up parents can link account with them to see their driving statistics. In order for accounts to be linked the parents must know their children's username and password, this makes the process safe. After successfully linking accounts parents can monitor their children by seeing where they are and how fast they drive.

How we built it

We wanted to build an app so we decided on Android Studio. From here we needed a place to quickly put and receive data. After much research we discovered that a traditional database was to slow for our needs. We settled on Google's FireBase platform. We took advantage of their real time data base, this let us quickly access the database whenever needed. We then needed to display the children's coordinates on the parents app. To do this we used Google's map API's. To change the map to our needs we had to go more in depth in Google's API. This allowed us to change the marker images, marker sizes, and provide additional information.

Challenges we ran into

One of the core aspects of our app was to get the teens current location. Since we were inside of a building for most of the development the location services on our phone stopped working from time to time. We got past this by going in groups of 2 to walk around the building until we found a location that had a strong location signal. Another challenge was the fact that none of us were familiar with Google's FireBase platform. We were able to combat this by finding someone who was very well experienced in the FireBase platform as well as doing research together to fix our problems. We also chose to use InkScape over the more traditional software such as Adobe Photoshop and Gimp 2 in order to design our assets with better scale ability. This was especially important because we were developing on the android platform which consists of devices with resolutions of 800x600 all the way up to devices with a 4K screen resolution. The biggest difference was learning vector graphics instead of the standard paint brush based raster graphics.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learning several new software tools such as FireBase and InkScape. The way our team worked together through challenges we faced. Helping out other groups who faced similar problems to us.

What we learned

We learned that in groups everyone has different strengths and weaknesses, if people in the group only focus on what their good at the group will never succeed. We learned how to use various different softwares such as InkScape and FireBase as well as learning new techniques on how to debug challenges we faced.

What's next for Teen Tracker

We will implement an automatic logging feature so that parents do not constantly have to look at their phones while their children are driving. We will also add a way for the parents to communicate safely with their child if they are ever speeding.

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