As first-year and transfer students learn to navigate Cornell’s 10 dining halls, five fitness centers, numerous bus routes and everything else the campus has to offer, a student-designed app aims to make the learning process easier.
Created by Ben Koppe ’26 in December 2024, BearTrak allows students to see dining hall menus and hours, track the TCAT bus system, check gym hours and crowds, access library hours and find printers on campus. The app also provides directions for getting to any of the libraries, dining halls and gyms on campus.
“At some point, I just realized that everything can really fit together in one single app,” Koppe said.
Koppe, who majors in computer science, coded and designed the app himself because of how much public data is readily accessible to students through the University. He credits Zain Bilal ’28 with the gym prediction algorithm and exchange student Hiral Arora ’26 with the app icon.
Bilal shared that after going to the gym this summer but never knowing when it would be crowded, he decided to develop a model for BearTrak that predicts when gyms would be most busy.
“Being part of BearTrak means using my skills to make life a little easier for me and other Cornell students, which I think is exciting,” Bilal said.
BearTrak became available for students to download in December.
“I was posting on Sidechat and Reddit trying to get the word out,” Koppe shared regarding his initial marketing tactics when the app first launched. According to Koppe’s data, it has gained a total of approximately 3,900 downloads since its release. Additionally, the app has since added new features, including incorporating student ID barcodes to swipe into the dining halls and the locations of printers on campus.
Koppe said that the app particularly gained traction when students returned to campus, going from 200 daily users at the end of the spring semester to over 700 at the start of the fall semester.
“I think word of mouth was probably a huge part of that,” he said regarding the uptick in users. “I had someone tell me they mentioned BearTrak during the orientation [event] they [led].”
This prompted him to change his marketing; Koppe created flyers and hung them in various locations across campus, especially in Okenshields.
The flyers generated some backlash from students involved with Cornell project team AppDev, as it largely called their app, Eatery, dated. Eatery, which was developed by Cornell AppDev in 2014, provides similar features to BearTrak, such as dining hall menus and hours.
However, this conflict between the apps was seemingly short-lived. Shrayes Gunna ’27, marketing lead for Cornell AppDev, shared that Koppe and Cornell AppDev members recently met to discuss the future of the two apps.
“Moving forward, I think, based on the conversation we had with Ben, we are going to be enabling each other’s work, and less so trying to tear each other down,” Gunna said.
Koppe shared a similar sentiment in regard to Eatery and Cornell AppDev.
“I think we are fully friendly with one another,” Koppe said. “I definitely get them wanting to have more of a focus on features and not putting other random apps out there.”
To get BearTrak on the app store, Koppe pays $100 per year and an additional $5 a month for the app’s server, all paid out of his own pocket. Since Koppe is a senior, he is unsure about the future of BearTrak.
“There’s so many directions that I could go,” Koppe said. “[I could] hand it off to someone [random] like that or find people that really care about it around here.”
Sophia Koman is a member of the Class of 2027 in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. She is a staff writer for the News department and can be reached at skoman@cornellsun.com.
