Smart Carpool wins Rep. Stephanie I. Bice’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Oklahoma’s Fifth District

When asked what inspired the creation of Smart Carpool, the students said, ”We were inspired to create this app after witnessing the struggles faced by teachers at our school to efficiently dispatch students to their parent’s cars. It was woefully inefficient and unreliable. The walkie-talkie system made it difficult to communicate and was prone to human error. This caused congestion outside of the school and blocked traffic, which had serious negative effects. We faced this issue ourselves, as the blocked traffic made it difficult for us to leave school without sacrificing a good amount of time. The car queue usually extended to the main road, which could create serious consequences. As such, we decided to create an app to improve overall efficiency that could be operated using a phone. We wanted to speed up the process of sending students out when parents walk up to the school to pick their child up. Thus, we built a QR code system to allow the teachers to scan the code and send the correct students out. We also wanted to remove the walkie-talkie system, so we built a database system which would allow changes to be seen instantaneously across all the devices of a particular school. However, this still left the system prone to errors, as the teachers had to ask the parents who they were picking up. In response, we built a license plate scanner which automatically notified teachers which students are ready to be picked up without interacting with parents. The license plates are all encoded using a SHA-256 algorithm to protect the parents’ information.”