UPDATE: As of Week 2 my refined “gap” is…

• Use data visualization to minimize disruption to a family’s daily routine: quantifying the things that we all do to make a family run like clockwork.

My “gap” is…

• Waiting for the school bus: Never comes on time in either snow, sleet, rain, or shine.

I try to walk my kids up to the end of our road every morning where the school bus picks them up (about 3-5 minutes from front door to pickup point). There is generally a window of about 20 minutes within which the school bus usually arrives (with the occasional 30-40 minute delay due to breakdown, sick child, accident). On most mornings, when the weather is nice this is actually fine as we get to spend some uninterrupted time chatting before they get picked up for school. But on days with inclement weather or where either we or the school bus are running late it would be much nicer to know exactly when the bus was going to arrive at our stop so we could plan accordingly. In addition, there have been times where we have been waiting for them to come home in the afternoon and been in a mild panic if the bus is over 15 minutes late. And every once in a very rare while we’ve actually had a kid miss the bus home, or attend an after school activity without telling us, where we had a major panic attack when they didn’t get off the bus at all.

It would be so nice to be able to track the progress of the school bus itself in order to know when it will be arriving at our stop as well as to confirm that my child is in fact on the (right) bus to begin with.