CampusOne

Campus Locator Map to find specific location
Main interface of CampusOne
Links to additional essential SUTD website

Inspiration

University life can be overwhelming, and students often face significant time loss navigating fragmented campus resources. Students frequently make their way to the canteen only to realize they lack sufficient time to eat due to unpredictable lunch crowds, especially when they have urgent assignments to complete. Additionally, new students and visitors often struggle to locate specific academic rooms like Think Tanks or Lecture Theatres within the complex campus layout. We created CampusOne to give students back their time by providing transparency for both dining congestion and campus navigation before they even leave their study spots.

What it does

CampusOne is a dual-feature "super-app" designed to optimize daily campus life:

Canteen Crowd Checker: This feature provides live occupancy updates. It informs students about the lunch crowd so they can avoid peak congestion and manage their schedules wisely.

Campus Locator: This navigation hub features interactive maps to help users find specific locations like Fab Lab and Lecture Theatres. It also consolidates essential academic links into a centralized directory.

How we built it

The project was developed using Python and the Streamlit framework to create a responsive, web-based dashboard.

Human-Sensor Network: To ensure accuracy without expensive hardware, we implemented a crowdsourced reporting system where users submit live canteen data.

Real-Time Logic: using crowdsourced data we plotted graphs to accurately provide everyone with accurate information.

Interactive Mapping: Using Plotly, we built maps that allow users to search for a room and see its exact location highlighted on a normalized 0-100 coordinate grid.

Backend & UI: A local SQLite database manages check-ins and gamification, while custom CSS provides a modern, "app-like" interface with status pills and KPI cards.

Challenges we ran into

Data Integrity: Relying on manual reports required mechanisms to prevent spam, such as a 30-second cooldown and a points-based incentive system to encourage honest reporting.

Navigation Friction: Calibrating static coordinates to a dynamic UI was necessary to ensure the "Green dot" correctly identified places like library from other locations.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We successfully built a hardware-free solution that addresses physical campus problems using pure software and community participation. Consolidating live crowdsourcing, data visualization, and navigation tools into a single, cohesive "super-app" interface was a major milestone for our team.

What we learned

We gained insights into the importance of UX in crowdsourcing, learning that gamification elements like points are essential to maintaining a "human-sensor" network. We also deepened our technical understanding of data weighting and real-time streams.