Inspiration

While creating incentive to car pool was our main goal with this application, we were inspired by apps such as Uber and Ola. Why couldn't a similar idea be applied to car pooling? Along with this, we've often found that many citizens in our city are quite keen on helping the environment, but don't know how to. We are some of those people. With Polo, users have an easy way to help the environment in a way that is incorporated into their working lives.

What it does

Polo helps a user find someone to car pool with. So it's like booking a cab, except it's free, and helps the environment due to lower CO2 emissions. In addition, users receive a certain number of points at the end of their ride, which they can trade in for vouchers and coupons available on the app. Essentially, Polo encourages users to car pool.

How we built it

We built Polo using Kodular, a platform used to create applications. We used Kodular because of some very useful features, such as the ability to test the app while developing it with minimal effort. We used the platform for the front end and back end of the app.

Challenges we ran into

Using the Google Maps API on Kodular was quite difficult since we weren't very familiar with using it. However, we were able to figure out how to implement it to create a clickable version of our idea.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Rishabh and I (Nikita) know only the very basics of coding and this is our first time creating an app. That did put us at a disadvantage considering we would have a hard time navigating through software such as Android Studio. However, Kodular was more simple to use, especially for inexperienced coders. And while our app currently doesn't have all the features we intended to have, we're proud that we were able to bring our idea to life.

What we learned

We were able to learn a huge amount in a short span of time, which I think is the essence of hackathons. This weekend was a great experience, with the time crunch giving us copious amounts of stress, but our successes giving us immense happiness. We were able to become extremely familiar with Kodular, a platform we'd never used before, and were inspired to start learning other coding languages for future projects. We hope we're able to create a fully functional app for our next hackathon.

What's next for Polo

The first step would be to adapt Polo to make it a fully functional app. Second would be to introduce more safety features for our users, which include an OTP system for rides, safety policy agreements and the ability to send notifications to request for a specific driver (currently, the app automatically assigns the car which is closest to the user, and heading to the same destination) . We'd also want to make Polo something that can be used all over the world, no restrictions.

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