Roam

Your needs on campus-fulfilled for students by students

Inspiration

Our team's inspiration comes from our own personal experiences as college students with a hectic schedule. With school, assignments, work, and personal issues going on it's easy to forget the little things until we realize we need it. We wanted to solve this issue by making the process of purchasing these last-minute items easier on the student using the student population.

What it does

Roam is an application built for university students by students. Students can sign up on the application as a Roamer- a person who publishes their location live on campus to deliver the goods- or as a consumer- the person who requests the goods. When consumers send in a pick-up request, Roam will search to connect them to the closest Roamer and send the request through. Once the Roamer accepts the task, the live location of the Roamer will be available until the items are delivered and both parties have completed the trip tasks on their phones. Once the items are delivered and the trip is over, the process starts over again.

How they built it

Our team decided to build our Roam application using Xcode, Swift, and Google Cloud's Firebase API. We decided on an iOS application because, with college students constantly on the go, it would be the most feasible if the application was accessible on their mobile device and specifically iOS because of the majority of Apple users on campus. We started off the developing by creating the User Interface and different views of the application and then linking the buttons and text fields to Swift to make the actions come to life. After linking the functionality of the user interface and programming to ensure everything worked, we then integrated Google Cloud's Firebase API to keep track of all the user login/sign up information.

Challenges they ran into

Some challenges our team ran into along the way were the fact that all of us had beginner-intermediate background knowledge on Swift and Xcode and using Firebase's API before. We had to learn and apply Swift simultaneously in order to ensure that our application would be complete and that the functionality was working correctly. Another issue was with the Firebase because none of our team members have had experience using it before so it was a learn-and-apply situation as we went along.

Accomplishments they are proud of

Some accomplishments that my team and I are proud of are that we got our application to work and have functional interactions/responses with the user and successfully integrating Firebase within our code to ensure that we created a robust log in/sign up page.

What they learned

Our team would first like to thank CruzHacks and MLH for allowing us this opportunity to learn and grow as programmers. Our team learned so much during this process, we all expanded our background knowledge in Swift and in Xcode and learned how to successfully use Firebase for now and future use.

What’s next?

As of currently, Roam has items from the university bookstore such as scantrons, keychains, college gear and more. But it can also be expanded to the dining halls and restaurants located on campus and incorporate university currency as a form of payment. This can help the students with purchasing of certain items on campus by using their university account. As time goes on, these features even more expanded but the main focus stays the same- to fulfill needs on campus for students by students.

Built with:

• Cocoa-pods

• Google-cloud

• Google-firebase

• Swift

• xcode

Try it out:

https://github.com/darrel1925/Roam

Devpost Link:

https://devpost.com/software/roam-d9gbya