The Aggie Map™

Aggieland’s One Stop Shop: Real-time crowd insights, campus events, study spots, and more, all in one place.

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Inspiration

Calendars, group chats, emails, and Canvas posts. They say everything is bigger in Texas, and Texas A&M sure isn’t an exception to that rule. With tens of thousands of students, hundreds of events and one of the largest campuses in the nation, it isn’t hard to become overwhelmed with the sheer amount going on here.

The Aggie Map™ is here to help. Study spots, real time crowd analysis (so you don’t get caught circling Zach or Evans ever again!) and much, much more, ranging from recreational facilities to any on campus event you can think of. We’re inspired by a vision of a life in which we don’t have to go on a wild goose chase to plan our day, in which there is a single solution, a central hub in which we can plan our study sessions, workouts, events, and much more.

What it does

The Aggie Map™ collects, scrapes, and combines data from any on campus source you can think of. We collated official university calendars, online sources, Texas A&M APIs, and a variety of other resources to bring you Aggieland's one stop shop. This isn't just a calendar app, club suggestion tool, or study spot finder. We've built something that anyone can use for any of their on campus needs, whether that be checking how busy your favorite study spot is, planning your workouts, finding events on campus, and even adding them directly to your calendar!

This is all accessible on a map interface, which even incorporates a heat map layer that shows you what parts of campus are busy at a glance. To make it even better, we've incorporated a Ping feature that will allow you to show off your 12th Man Spirit and help a fellow Aggie out through a simple interface similar to Google Maps. Click the Ping tab, add some details about the location you're in, and it will be immediately be incorporated into our suggestion algorithms and help tens of thousands of other Aggies out.

How we built it

We began with a foundation of FastAPI, which made a series of concurrent API calls. First, we called a variety of Texas A&M capacity APIs concurrently with the Google Maps API to get the capacity of various common campus locations ranging from libraries to recreation centers. Then, we used web scraping to analyze official Texas A&M calendars and create events based on the results. Finally, we train and deploy an Anthropic large language model that helps answer our user’s questions and guide them through The Aggie Map™.

To create a pleasant user experience, we use a frontend of HTML5 -> CSS -> React, which we build with Vite. We then use Material UI as an additional layer above React, creating a modern and sleek style to further improve the user experience. Then, we make additional calls to Google Maps API on the frontend to generate a map interface and use Leaflet to style and create a heat map that exists in a layer above the actual output of the Google Maps API. Finally, to validate input and ensure students are enrolled in Texas A&M, we use Clerk to create an SSO portal that validates student credentials using their NetID in true Aggie fashion.

Challenges we ran into

Our vision for this project was admittedly ambitious, and due to that we ran into a multitude of issues we had to resolve within 24 hours. However, I feel we communicated very well given it was our first time working together and we were able to resolve every major problem.

  1. Our primary difficulty was combining the backend and frontend, especially given that we deployed the entire project to a virtual server. Managing aspects such as CORS, .env files and requirements.txt files was time consuming, but an incredible learning experience. We now have our entire web application deployed to the cloud, from frontend and authentication to API calls and web scraping to backend.

  2. Designing and architecting a project like this was difficult due to the sheer amount of information and guidance we wanted to provide to our users. There have been many applications that incorporate a schedule converter, or a study spot locator, or even a club suggestion platform, but building out our vision for a one stop shop that scrapes event data, finds capacity data for every location that students work and play, and integrates predictive analytics and LLMs to suggest new events and guide students through their day was overwhelming at first. It was difficult to pass so much data across different layers of the application, and figuring out in which order to build and coordinating that across a new team was also a challenge at times. However, I think we are all very happy with the scope, UX, and number of features we were able to implement and believe that this is a promising project that will have a major impact on Aggies from all spheres of life and all parts of campus.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're incredibly proud of what we were able to accomplish in twenty four hours, but I'd say the one feature I love most is the Maps and Calendar integration. When we were first learning about HowdyHack, we found a Calendar conversion project. We were all impressed, and uncertain about how we could accomplish something like that in 24 hours. In this project, we are able to do a full calendar integration on top of the scope of The Aggie Map™, ranging from heat maps to show how busy campus is to personalized event suggestions and even an LLM agent that guides users through our platform. Rather than any single feature, we're most impressed by how much we rose to the occasion and exceeded the limitations we imposed on ourselves. HowdyHack 2025 brought out the best in us.

What we learned

We can honestly say that every member of our group learned a great amount despite only competing for such a short amount of time. Whether that be microservices or API calls, deploying to the cloud or implementing authentication, there are so many new frameworks and technologies that architecting and implementing a full stack web application as large in scope as The Aggie Map™ forces you to learn. It also forces an understanding of software across different perspectives, ranging from a high level system design perspective down to the individual optimizations and operations that allow such a complex system to run. We're incredibly grateful that we were able to learn so much in such a short amount of time.

What's next for The Aggie Map™

This hackathon was a great start for The Aggie Map™, but there is so much more we can do. Integrating a database to help store user information and personalize their experience will be a top priority given more time, and we would also like to extend the adoption of the Ping feature to make our crowdsourcing and data quality higher than ever. Most of all, the next step for the The Aggie Map™ is mass user adoption. We believe this is a tool that can have a real impact on a campus as large and busy as Texas A&M, and the feedback from users is always superior.

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