To think it all began at CruzHacks in January 2023.

A group of mega-brainy, tech-savvy students from UC Santa Cruz have fought their way into the finals of the Google Solutions Challenge, an ultra competitive, nerd Olympics where the brightest minds from colleges and universities across the globe duke it out to craft the most innovative apps. The objective? Addressing some of the most pressing issues reflected in the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

Our underdog protagonists, a quartet with the quirky name SlugLoop, have slogged, slaved and smartly strategized their way into the top 10 from a pool of 100 teams. And here’s the twist: they're the only Yanks in the final round.

Their project: a mobile app, also dubbed SlugLoop, that tracks the university’s loop shuttle buses in real-time. The app creators are none other than the current UCSC students, Annie Liu and Alex Liu (no relation), and fresh-outta-college grads Nicholas Szwed and Bill Zhang.

The idea was inspired by a Reddit thread full of grumbling students vexed by the irregularity of the loop buses. This sparked a light bulb moment for Zhang, the product manager of SlugLoop. He felt the same frustration and found himself nodding along to the complaints about a discontinued bus tracking system.

Zhang, on a mission, started a quest for knowledge about the defunct system. He got a chance to implement his ideas at the CruzHacks event, a student-run hackathon at the university. After a successful brainstorming session, they crafted a rough version of the SlugLoop project.

The initial trio of Zhang, Alex Liu, and Annie Liu found a fourth musketeer in Szwed during the hackathon, and together, they turned the rough draft into a working app, which they submitted to the Google Solutions Challenge. The project resonated with the sustainable development goals of the UN, and could make a meaningful impact by addressing an unmet need and improving the way students tracked the buses.

Now, SlugLoop isn't just your average app. And the problem has been the focus of many teams over the past 5 years of CruzHacks, but none have taken it to Google’s orbit. It’s a sophisticated piece of kit, split into three main parts: the user-facing mobile application, a server, and a database where they store all the info. Every five seconds, receivers take data from the buses and beam it to the SlugLoop server,

Creating this beast wasn't all smooth sailing. They had to get permission to fix some busted receivers on roofs, which, unsurprisingly, the school wasn't thrilled about students clambering onto. But their perseverance paid off, and they emerged as the only team from the US to make it into the top 10 in this year’s Solutions Challenge. More surprising still, they are the only U.S. team to have reached the finals in the past three years.

Now they're gearing up for the final round, to be livestreamed on YouTube at 1 p.m. on Aug. 3. The SlugLoop team, who are veterans of presenting projects in their college classes, are bracing themselves to showcase their app to a global audience and a panel of Google judges. The top three grand prize winners will be announced during the livestream. They're confident, but there's a healthy dose of jitters.

To make the top 100, let alone the top 10, is like hitching a space shuttle, not just the campus bus.

For more info on the Demo Day event, head over to gdsc.community.dev. And remember to root for team SlugLoop.