At University of Maryland, Baltimore County, four computer science and information systems students are tackling one of the campus’s most persistent frustrations: parking.
During HackUMBC, the university’s 24-hour hackathon competition, a group comprising Lehbah Amin, Malak Abdeldayam, Samira Ali and Farell Kimble developed Orbit, a prototype for an app designed to make finding a parking spot faster and easier.
With roughly 64 percent of UMBC’s students commuting to campus, the group noticed how long it can take to find a parking spot and set out to fix it. Each student had a different job, with Abdeldayam and Ali as the back-end developers, Amin as the front-end developer and Kimble as the hardware technician.
Abdeldayam described the parking situation at UMBC as “atrocious.” Once, she said, it took her an hour to find parking, forcing her to skip a class just to park her car.
“It impacts my study schedule. I can’t even just get to school and just start studying,” Abdeldayam said. “I have to get to school, and then I have to find parking, and then I have to make sure that I’m not going to get ticketed for it.”
Ali, who is a residential student, said that although she does not deal with parking herself, she’s seen firsthand how staff and faculty are impacted by this issue.
“Professors will be coming in late because they can’t find parking to teach their lectures. It’s such a recurring problem,” Ali said.
When opening the Orbit app, users are prompted to log in with their student email credentials and student ID. They also enter their car make and model, and their designated university parking permit. Once logged in, the app will show a live map view of the spots they are permitted to park in across campus.
Users can then click to reserve or release a spot, earning points each time they give up a spot and spending points when they claim a spot. As users accumulate points, they can redeem them for a full day of automatic parking reservations and get priority access to ideal parking spots across campus.
Kimble, who lives on campus, said that although the app is mostly for commuters, residents who want to park closer to their residence hall can benefit as well. Kimble uses the example of parking at Susquehanna Hall, a residence hall on campus.
“Once you accumulate enough points, you’ll be able to get notified when your ideal parking spots are available. For example, let’s say you live at Sus, you’ll be able to know what parking spots at Sus are available,” he said.
Kimble said the app is really about “convenience” and being able to “know when a parking spot is available and be able to claim it.”
Abdeldayam compared the point system to Dunkin’s rewards program, noting that Gen Z “loves scanning for their rewards with no shame,” and said the team wanted to incentivize students to use the parking app.
The team built Orbit using C++, a programming language, structured query language for data management, and Figma, a design platform for prototyping. They also integrated a large demographic dataset provided by UMBC’s Department of Information Technology.
Though the team acknowledged that time constraints of the hackathon limited their development for Orbit, they are excited to continue pursuing the idea. HackUMBC Internal Vice President Jake Winkler said the hackathon gives students real-life experience to create solutions to problems and often serves as a launchpad for students to keep refining their projects after the event ends.
“There’s always opportunities to continue improving on your projects after the hackathon,” Winkler said. “Oftentimes, people don’t realize how passionate they feel about a subject until they take the time over a weekend of developing and then realize there’s something there that they should keep pursuing.”
In the future, the team plans to incorporate sensors in parking lots to automatically track cars entering and exiting, helping to expand their dataset and improve algorithm efficiency.
Currently, the team is looking for sponsors, investors, and collaborators to help cover developmental costs. The students also plan to work with UMBC faculty and mentors to prepare to bring the project into a professional setting and eventually expand beyond UMBC’s campus.
“We just need people to believe in our idea,” Amin said.
