TerpWalk

Who You Built This For and Why They Need It We built this for students on UMD's campus, specifically women who walk alone at night and have no good tool to make that a safer experience. The existing resources (blue emergency lights, campus alerts) are spread out and sometimes hard to notice. They exist but you have to already know where they are, already feel unsafe, already be in danger. TerpWalk flips that, it's proactive. It routes you toward safety before anything goes wrong. The target user is any woman who has ever texted a friend "I'm walking back from McKeldin, I'll let you know when I'm home", which is a common experience for many. How You Used Claude / AI We used claude for the safety score reasoning. Claude analyzes a route and generates a safety score out of 100 based on it's own knowledge of number of blue lights you are passing or whether you are walking through a parking lot. Also with our heatmap, when users submit an unsafe area report, Claude categorizes and summarizes it so the heatmap stays updated. Claude also analyzes two different routes and shows the original route in red versus the safer route in green so you can tell the difference. Even if the original route is faster, the alternative route is safer. What Could Go Wrong and How You Addressed It Safety score was where we had a lot of issues. Even though our website was routing us through parking lots which are considered unsafe areas, we were getting safety scores of 90+/100 which was very inaccurate and could be misleading. We addressed by it by feeding Claude data on major parking lots around campus and to identify those areas as unsafe. This helped produce more optimal routes. What You'd Build Next With More Time With more time, we would like to develop this into an app. This will make it easier for user to use and will be more convenient because they can access it simply from their phones. We also wanted to add a feature where you can add an emergency contact and if you start your walk and are idle for more than the time it was supposed to take for you to get to that specific destination, it would send an alert to your emergency contact. This would add another layer of safety.