Ambrosia

Inspiration

_Should I buy food or pay for my rent? _ _ A menu with 20 items and all I can eat is rice and beans? It's been my dinner this entire week but I guess one more time won't hurt _

College students everywhere face these issues. Many have to choose between buying food or paying for other necessities such as housing bills, often forced to go hungry. Others don't even get the chance to make this choice. The lack of accessible options for people with dietary restrictions including vegetarianism, veganism, lactose intolerance, among others, means that they don't get the nutrition they need.

What it does

This app is designed to be college students' guide to affordable and accessible food. At this stage, it is designed to connect to and extend a program at our college campus called the Maverick Discount Program. Through this program, students at the University of Texas at Arlington can get discounts at several local businesses. There is a severe lack of information about it and it is underutilized. Using our app, students can find this information in an easy-to-use interface. In addition, the original functionality is extended by helping students filter the discounted places based on their menu items. This enables them to find out how many and what options they will have to eat before they eat a restaurant, reducing the anxiety and frustration of showing up to a place only to find out there are no options to eat.

Finally, we hope to provide those who need it with information on how they can get more formal aid by providing them with information about and access to resources such as Food Pantries and SNAP.

How we built it

The UI/UX Design for this app was created using Figma and Locofy. Figma allowed us to create the design and Locofy aided us with the front-end development. Additionally, we used FireBase for sign-on authentication.

Challenges we ran into

As these were new technologies, there was a bit of a learning curve. Many of us had never worked on front-end development and didn't know how much went into it! It required attention to detail and patience.

One specific issue we dealt with was the scrolling of our webpages. Creating active components such as this is a different process from creating aesthetic components. We had designed them as aesthetic components and had to work through Locofy and Figma’s documentation to redo our structure to allow the two technologies to integrate.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

More than anything, we are proud of our persistence with and teamwork during this process. Each of us came into this with different skillsets and as mentioned, neither of us had used these very frequently or at all in the past. It required us to be open to failing and to troubleshoot these errors through the correct sources. This is an incredible skill to learn because in Computer Science, it is just as important or perhaps even more important to learn how to and where to get help with solving a problem instead of just knowing how to solve the problem from the start.

What's next for Ambrosia

In the future, we hope to implement a database through Firebase or integrate APIs into our program to allow us to expand the number of restaurants in our app. This will help us store the restaurant information such as the menu items, food choices it supports, etc. We can also implement an algorithm that can help us create personalized suggestions for users based on their past interests, their dietary restrictions, and their location.

Built With

• figma
• firebase
• javascript
• locofy
• react
• react-native