UC Santa Cruz team makes final round of Google app challenge

SANTA CRUZ — A team of UC Santa Cruz students has made it to the final round of the Google Solutions Challenge, which gives app developer teams from colleges and universities all over the world an opportunity to compete with each other to create innovative apps that solve problems centered around the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

The UCSC-based team of four, called SlugLoop, is one of 10 Solutions Challenge finalists out of the top 100 teams from around the globe, and the only team from the U.S. that made the final round.

The mobile app tracks the university’s loop shuttle buses in real-time, hence the name, SlugLoop. The application was developed by current UCSC students Annie Liu and Alex Liu, and recent graduates Nicholas Szwed and Bill Zhang, and is currently deployed and used by students at the university.

“The inspiration for this project actually came from a Reddit post where some students were complaining about the irregular schedules of the loop buses,” said Zhang, product manager for SlugLoop. “I found myself agreeing with their frustrations and one of the comments caught my attention that said that the school already had a loop bus tracker but it had been discontinued.”

Zhang began to reach out to professors about the discontinued bus tracking app and last February took his knowledge of the defunct system into the university’s student-run hackathon known as CruzHacks, which, like the Solutions Challenge, focuses on developing technology that contributes to the social good.

The initial team consisted of Zhang, Alex Liu and Annie Liu, and Szwed came onboard during the CruzHacks event where they created the first rough iteration of the SlugLoop project, which they further developed into a working app and submitted to the Google Solutions Challenge.

“Initially, I think we found the project to fit very well with the sustainable development goals of the United Nations,” said Szwed. “It impacted people in a meaningful way and there was this need that wasn’t met, where students wanted to track the loop better, and so we thought it would be a perfect fit for the challenge.”

SlugLoop consists of three main parts: the user-facing mobile application, a server and a database where the gathered information is stored.

“The buses send data to our receivers and every five seconds, our receivers will send the bus location to our server,” said Zhang. “Our front end is pretty simple and everything is combined by the database.”

Creating an accurate bus tracker app wasn’t easy for the team as they were able to use some of the hardware already in place on the buses and buildings from the previous loop tracking system, but they had to fix it first.

“Two of the receivers on the roofs were broken,” said Zhang. “And we had to gain access to the roofs but the school doesn’t really give students access to the roofs because of safety issues, so we had to reach out to building coordinators to get permission to get on the roofs, and that took a while.”

The team’s patience and hard work paid off as it is the only team from the states to become a top 10 finalist in this year’s Solutions Challenge. Zhang looked into this fact further and discovered that the SlugLoop team was the only U.S.-based team in the past three years to make the cut.

“For me, that was really shocking,” said Zhang. “I was looking at projects from this year and previous years, and most of them have a global reach. For example, making it easier to do COVID testing where our project is only for UCSC. It’s just shocking that our local project beat these global reach projects.”

The final round of the Google Solutions Challenge will be livestreamed on YouTube at 1 p.m. Aug. 3. At the Solutions Challenge Demo Day event, each of the 10 finalists will present their applications and how Google products and platforms were used to create them to a panel of Google judges. The top three grand prize winners will be announced during the livestream.

The members of the SlugLoop team have presented application projects in a similar way in their college classes, but never to a worldwide audience and a panel of judges, so they’re confident, but a little nervous.

“Looking at the competition, it’s going to be pretty tough,” said Zhang. “I was surprised we made it to the top 100 and then the top 10 and if we make it to the top three, I’ll be amazed.”

“I’m kind of in a dream right now,” added Szwed. “If we were to win the whole thing, I’d be ecstatic, but I am so proud of the team and the work we’ve done to get to this point.”

For information about the Demo Day event, visit gdsc.community.dev.