A web app that allows travelers to pair up with bilingual travelers can help translate and navigate foreign airports. My team and I built this web app at HackUNT and won 2nd place in the American Airlines Challenge.

With foreign grandparents flying to America to visit relatives, we realized that they often struggle with layovers due to language barriers. In order to improve theirs and many others' travel experiences, we built Bilingual Buddy.

Bilingual Buddy pairs a translator to those that need translations through a web based application that can be incorporated in the screens of each American Airlines plane seat, so those that need translations could arrange for help before landing. It allows those with language barriers to get to their next layover gate fast and efficiently while awarding the translator as well.

Bilingual Buddy is built using JavaScript/jQuery, HTML, CSS, and Firebase. Using the American Airlines API, we were able to get airline travel information for layover flights.

We originally had an idea at first, but the app had already been made. Therefore, we had to pivot and adapt halfway through building our project.

For most of our group, it was our first hackathon. We were able to go from merely just an idea to a full blown viable product at the end of 24 hours. Overall, a very fun experience!

We appreciated learning certain aspects of Firebase and Google Cloud API that allowed us to have a dynamic backend experience for the user. Finally, we learned the art of dividing and conquering and simply working together within a small team.

Go to https://raspgary.github.io/Bilingual-Buddy/ or simply clone the repo and open the main.html file in a browser(preferably Chrome). A customer frequent flyer number you can test would be martha123. All the translators' frequent flyer numbers are their names followed by 123. For example, Norman's frequent flyer number would be norman123. You can see the translators on the booking page once you enter martha123 to book a translator for Martha. To get the special font, follow the instructions in the install-a-new-font.txt. The .otf files are in the fonts directory.