ParkBuddy

Intention

ParkBuddy is an SMS chatbot that provides the latest wait time information for you favorite theme parks. This will be a consolidation of multiple different parks from Disney, Universal, and others like Alton Towers. Many theme parks have smartphone apps, but they are slow resource hungry. This app is designed to be quicker and less resource intensive. 

Functionality

ParkBuddy has the following functions:

1. Locate wait times for a specific ride
   
2. Locate wait times for a specific 'area' or 'land' of the park
   
3. Present recommendations for specific rides
4. Find wait times under a user specified time

ParkBuddy works for the following parks: Magic Kingdom

Workflow

Below is an example case of a user interacting with ParkBuddy

Technical Implementation

I incorporated the following Ruby gems and APIs.

Echelon (https://github.com/lloydpick/echelon) calls theme park APIs to access information such as name, wait time, and active status. 

Twilio (https://www.twilio.com/) was used to incorporate the SMS integration with.

Heroku (https://www.heroku.com) is a cloud-based application platform where ParkBuddy is hosted.

PostgresQL (https://www.postgresql.org/)  was used to create a database that store ride information and recommendations locally.

To view the code in its entirety, visit the GitHub repository here: https://github.com/daraghbyrne/onlineprototypes2017/tree/master/students/markd1