Eco Engineer

You are a designer creating bus routes with the goal of being the most carbon efficient and transporting the most people, allowing users to explore the correlation between travel and carbon emission

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Inspiration

Our inspiration was to create a fun and engaging way for users to learn and take action to lower their carbon emissions. By raising awareness of this issue, we hope to improve our community and the environment. Our platform also solves the local issue of bus transportation. Eco Engineer allows the user to design more efficient bus routes in an environmentally friendly manner. Some statistics that inspired us to do this project are from https://climate.nasa.gov/.

What It Does

Eco Engineer allows users to build transportation routes around city blocks. Different blocks contain a certain amount of people. The goal is to move the most amount of people to landmarks while also maintaining the fewest carbon emissions. There are also other factors involved, such as budget and efficiency of moving people.

How We Built It

We used Pygame to simulate a city environment where you build your bus path. We started with a grid, added nodes at the intersections, and let you draw lines. We then implemented calculations to find your efficiency and your carbon emissions. Eco Engineer’s main grading approach uses Dijkstra Algorithm to find the most efficient bus route and compare the user's bus routes.

Challenges We Ran Into

We struggled with creating an easy and accessible UI and front-end functionality due to the lack of skills in that area. We also had problems with our grading algorithm and round-off errors.

Accomplishments that We are Proud Of

Our backend is extremely strong and redundant and will not spontaneously break. We were able to create an original and complex algorithm.

What We Learned

We learned valuable algorithmic problem-solving skills through debugging and coding this project. We also learned how to use and integrate APIs from Postman (API we used link). We used this API to do logarithmic functions in our code. We also used a second API from Postman for calculating the amount of carbon each bus route released. (API we used: link).

What's Next for Eco Engineer

Our next steps are web integration and creating a more engaging UI. One way we will do this is by adding different color options for bus routes, better controls, and animated buses. We would also allow separate bus routes giving the program more strategy.

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