Class Mapper

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  Inputting information

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  Loading icon

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  Viewing a day's route

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  Closer inspection with interactive map

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  Preparing for street view to get a closer look

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  Using street view

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  Looking at another day's route

Inspiration

As freshmen at Rutgers we came across the challenge of discovering where all of our classes were at the beginning of the year and how to get to each class. Planning out how to get from our dorm to our first class, then the second, and so on was a daunting task. Class Mapper hopes to alleviate that stress.

What it does

Our app resolves the issue by providing an interactive map of campus and showing the paths that you must take each day to get to all your classes. This can help students plan for their schedule so that they never miss a class while adjusting to college life. Even upper-classman could find this useful in seeing their daily commutes on a map. In fact, students and hop into Street View easily anywhere across their route so that they recognize important areas such as the building their class is in and the bus stop they need to be at. This information is invaluable in allowing students to seamlessly transition into their new schedules.

How we built it

Class Mapper uses a stundets' .ics calendar file (commonly used to import their classes onto a google calendar: https://eas.rutgers.edu/?ht_kb=import-course-schedule-to-google-calendar) as well as the location of their dorm to plan out how they must traverse campus in order to get from one place to the next. Class Mapper uses Google's Javascript Maps API to get directions between locations as well as overlaying these directions onto an interactive map.

Challenges we ran into

Our team encountered several roadblocks during the journey. The biggest by far was the issue of finding the closest bus stop to an individual which also was along a direct route to the passenger's destination. We also encountered temporary struggles in the construction of polylines with the google maps api, and the parsing, formatting, and transferring of the user's schedule to the backend and to the table on the frontend.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are most proud of our use of the google map api and the construction of polylines between our origins and destinations. We are also proud of the easy to use UI.

What we learned

We learned how to run a python subprocess in a javascript backend, how to use the google maps api, and how to implement socket.io in our frontend.

What's next for classMapper

We want to continue working on classMapper, and would like to soon implement a mobile version which will use GPS data to provide a live update on the map.

Built With

• css
• html
• javascript
• node.js
• python