At UMBC, 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 p

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