The project is an app developed for cellphones (smartphones), powered by Android for the student community to know the safest routes to get to school by car, bus and on foot.
The ideas
Knowledge of road and mobility safety is essential to be able to follow established rules and have a more secure and efficient drivers/pedestrians community. As the best routes have not been established, people choose the most popular, common and crowded routes causing gridlock, and the risk of accidents increases. The idea of the app is to set and display the safest routes to get to school, evaluating the quality of the sidewalks, the existence of road crossings on route and pedestrian safety. The app also shows ways to get to school by car and bus, evaluating the quality of the road for both car and bus. We think that this could become a worldwide feature that schools should implement to ensure that their students will arrive at school safely. It would also be a good way for schools to embrace technology and use it to benefit their students. The app also displays emergency numbers of the local and nearest establishments of the school.
The initiatives
The cellphone (smartphone) was the main idea to develop this project, using Android as the platform of the app where we display all of our research, information, emergency numbers within the zone where our school is located, and the best routes to get to high school. The students came up with the initiative of going to every single classroom to distribute the app via Bluetooth and give short conferences to talk about how easy it is to use the app, as well as how to use it.
• In the conferences we talked about the importance of using the sidewalks, crosswalks and about the importance of respecting pedestrians
• Students distributed the app to as many classmates as they could possibly could
• Students went to each classroom to teach their peers what the app is about and showed them how to use it.
The app was transferred to over 1000 high school students. We applied a quick poll with the students, and 940 said that they used the app and found it useful, accurate, easy to use. The other 60 students said that they hadn't had the chance to use it but that soon they will. We had previously visited elementary schools to teach young children the basics about safety and mobility. We taught 800 students about the subject.
• The safest routes are already being used by lots of the students in our school
• In the future we want to expand the app and set as many different safe routes to get to school as we can
• Make the app a worldwide feature proving that not only big things can make a change, but starting projects can do that too.
