School Pool
App for managing school carpooling in an effective and practical manner.
Car rides for school drop-off and pick-up cause many issues, as the statistics below show. Our app will help alleviate these problems.
Traffic congestion during school pickup and drop-off times.
20-30% of the traffic in the morning is from driving kids to school.
75 percent of school-aged children are taken to school by car.
Creates Dangerous driving conditions.
More school-age pedestrians were killed from 6 a.m. to 7 a.m. and from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. than any other hours of the day.
They increase pollution.
Driving children to school requires 180 gallons of gas.
Parents are stressed.
Time spent on child transportation logistics is equivalent to a part-time job.
Percentage of parents managing the transportation logistics: 62%
Percentage of parents report feeling stressed out at this task: 44%.
Cost of gas for this activity: $663
Additional miles on their car: 3600
Private ridesharing is expensive.
Carpooling appears to be the ideal solution to the aforementioned issues, so why is it not more common? Because organizing a carpool is difficult, which makes most parents opt out of the arrangement even if they sign up for it. The app will manage and optimize every aspect of the school pooling system by making technology do the work for us, resulting in a practical and effective, and secure solution.
This app will have the following features.
The ability to enter the destination address and search for existing carpools that meet their needs or to create a new carpool if no match fulfills one’s requirement.
The most unique feature of this app will be an in-built payment system for fairly sharing responsibility. In general, the driver of the carpool gets additional responsibilities which are why most carpool arrangements don't work in the long run. Having a payment system makes it fair and practical.The calculation will be based on the current gas price and the distance of the trip. It can be changed into a custom algorithm by the user.
A security feature with the ability to generate a QR code tying the children to the specific ride for each Carpool ‘Event’, which can be scanned by the school administrator to verify the driver is authorized to pick up the kids.
display of statistics about the gas, money, time, and CO2 emissions saved as green points on the app.
A GPS system to track the vehicle for parents' peace of mind.
A route optimization feature to suggest the most optimized route based on traffic conditions.
Automatic reminders and in-app messaging, as well as event synchronization with your calendar
Here is a link to the preliminary designs.
This Carpool App will help parents and adults who drive kids to school and other activities. It optimizes every aspect of the arrangement, from searching and creating carpools, to security, GPA tracking, route optimization, and payment sharing. This will save money, time, and peace of mind, and in addition, it will help reach sustainability goals by reducing pollution and traffic congestion.
I have the technical skills along with organizational skills to create a feasible solution to this problem. Resume: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1x7ZsT8c3pQzOumF4fj8R1bu6pOP6h9mcPCqMh2W4pn4/edit?usp=sharing
I am a high-achieving student who is known as a dependable and responsible person by my peers.
I participate in a multitude of clubs including FBLA, BETA, TSA, Science Olympiad, and many different honor societies, putting work in to maintain my status in all. Also, I am the team leader for a local organization called Meals By Grace (https://mealsbygrace.org/), providing food for the needy. I often instruct large groups of people to package a variety of foods, requiring a level of leadership skills. I am a member of a local government organization called MARC (https://atlantaregional.org/leadership-and-engagement/leadership-programs/model-atlanta-regional-commission-marc/) where I am involved in the planning and development of the Metro Atlanta Region. I was also a member of the Teenage Advisory Board where we helped the library and community implement programs, and promote and advocate for youth services in our district.
The problems I anticipate facing include difficulties in community engagement since a student-led enterprise may not be taken seriously, but we can make this work in our favor. Our team will primarily consist of students as they know the school systems best while acquiring volunteer hours for graduation requirements or college applications. In addition, students will most likely have access to a good network of interested users.
Being a student, I myself face this problem every day. I have also spoken to many parents in my community who have tried to carpool but opted out of the arrangement even if they signed up for it. I noted down the problems they faced and outlined how technology could help alleviate those problems.
- Taking action to combat climate change and its impacts (Sustainability)
- Concept: An idea being explored for its feasibility to build a product, service, or business model based on that idea.
There are some similar apps in the market but none of them have the features to make the arrangement practical.
Let us number the features in our app for easy comparison.
Easy carpool setup
Payment System
QR code-based verification
Rewards System
Route optimization
Automated Reminders
Sync events to Calendar
GPS Tracking
Other competitors have the features listed above.
GoKid: 1, 5, 6
Carpool-Kids:1, 6, 7
CarpooltoSchool: 1, 6
Karpool: 1
In comparison to the competitors, only our app provides features 2, 3, 4, and 8.
Feature 2 is important to make the carpooling arrangement practical, as generally in carpools, the driver has additional responsibilities, so most want to avoid being the designated driver. Having a payment system that pays the driver will make the arrangement fair and will also get nonparents interested as it will provide employment opportunities.
Feature 3 is an important security feature.
Feature 4 is important as the feeling that we're making progress is powerful and positive, but it only comes when you can actually see the rewards in a tangible fashion.
Feature 8 is an additional feature for convenience.
The main obstacle will be convincing existing users of the competitors about this new app, developed mainly by "inexperienced" students, but we can turn this into an advantage as students know best about school systems.
We will target elementary schools first as they have a need to verify that only authorized personnel are picking the children up. This will give us leverage by encouraging parents in that school to use the parent version of this app and make it hard for new competition to take away our market share.
Since I have dabbled in app development before, I will develop this along with 3 more like-minded friends, but we will need a full-time senior developer for initial guidance for the first 3 months. There will be no need for an office setup, and we can work remotely and meet in one of our homes or library meeting rooms. The marketing, app enhancements, handling customer grievances, and financial responsibilities will be divided amongst the team members.
For the software needed to develop, we will use open source and the free software provided as part of the Github (a trusted company in the tech world) student pack as we will still be students in college and can avail of this offer. We will need to purchase the software needed to make the app secure and the scanners for QR scanning. When the app establishes itself in the market, the biggest expenditure will be needed to purchase additional computing power and storage and hire customer support personnel based on our needs.
Savings to the customer
An average family spends $663 worth of gas for this activity and puts 3600 miles on their car.
Assuming the average size of the pool: 4
Saving per family: $663 * ¾ = $497.25 in addition to saving time and energy, reducing stress, and benefiting the environment
If we can get 10% of the car riders to use our app in GA, where I am from, this is what the projection looks like.
Total number of school students in GA: 1,717,887
54.2% are car riders: 54.2% of 1,717,887 = 931,095
10% of 931,095= 93,110
Revenue projection:
Our biggest competitor, KoKid, is priced at $4.99/month, so let us assume we price ours at $4.
93,110 * 4 * 12 months = $4,469,280
Expenditure:
Maintenance 3.6K
App Marketing $5K
Prototype Testing $2K
Promotion $10K
Employee Wages (20 Support Personnel) $2M
ASO Strategies $1K
Misc. $20K
Donation $10K
TOTAL $2,051,600
Net Profit= $4,469,280- 2,051,600 =$2,417,680
This funding will be sufficient enough to keep us going.
A future plan is to work with the schools so that the pickup and drop-off times can be staggered into multiple time blocks to further ease the traffic and reduce wait times, using a system similar to the restaurant paging system. We can piggyback on the traffic infrastructure and real-time data that will soon be available to support different future technologies such as self-driving vehicles, which will be a standard reality soon. We will never stop innovating to make the planet greener; this app is just the beginning.
This solution will be developed using some mobile application frameworks like React Native.
Python, Java, Flutter, React Native, Swift, Kotlin, and R Programming can be used to develop a mobile application as they are the top mobile app technologies.
It will be made available on both IOS and Android devices.
- Software and Mobile Applications
Not yet developed, this is just at the design phase now.
I target to get 10% of the car riders to use our app in GA, where I am from, this is what the projection looks like.
Total number of school students in GA: 1,717,887
54.2% are car riders: 54.2% of 1,717,887 = 931,095
If we target 10% of the above numbers our users could be 93,110 (10% of 931,095)
The costs of this project (shown below) are prohibitive for a high school student. Also, I may not have enough technical proficiency to make the app secure, so an sr. developer will be needed, at least initially.
Initial Development Costs $40,000
Software - Free s/w available to students
Senior Developer Mentor - $30,000 (3 months)
QR Scanner For Testing - Free with Phones
Misc. - $10,000
No Office - Library/Home
Long Term Expenditure:$2,051,600
Maintenance 3.6K
App Marketing $5K
Prototype Testing $2K
Promotion $10K
Employee Wages (20 Support Personnels) $2M
ASO Strategies $1K
Misc $20K Donation $ 10K
N/A
Social Enterprise or B Corp.
If we can get 10% of the car riders to use our app in GA, where I am from, this is what the projection looks like.
Total number of school students in GA: 1,717,887 54.2% are car riders: 54.2% of 1,717,887 = 931,095 10% of 931,095= 93,110 Revenue projection: Our biggest competitor, KoKid, is priced at $4.99/month, so let us assume we price ours at $4. 931,10 * 4 * 12 months = $4,469,280
Expenditure:
Maintenance 3.6K App Marketing $5K Prototype Testing $2K Promotion $10K Employee Wages (20 Support Personnel) $2M ASO Strategies $1K Misc $20K Donation $ 10K TOTAL $2,051,600
Net Profit= $4,469,280- 2,051,600 =$2,417,680
This funding will be good to keep us going.
