Inspiration
As both members in our group is either working or used to work at bubble tea stores before, we often get bubble tea from each shift that we do. Yet, many months of making drinks for both ourselves and our customers made us realize the hidden sources of sugar that customers rarely think about (coming from syrups and toppings). This inspired us to make BobaBuddies, which lets us easily calculate the amount of sugar that we consume from our drinks in a fun and aesthetic way.
What it does
The main feature of our app is our bubble tea building function. It allows our users to play with the interactive display while making their own personalized bubble tea. Additionally, we have a sugar counter at the top right of our display. This sugar counter is unique. Instead of showing the weight of sugar consumed, it instead displays the percentage of your daily intake of sugar that your drink contains. This helps users gain a more accessible perspective of the amount of sugar they are consuming. Lastly, our ending page shows a receipt, containing the information about how much sugar is in each component of our user's drinks, as well as some advice regarding their sugar intake.
How we built it
We use the React Native framework to build our mobile application. Additionally, most of our UI is also done using hand-drawn art, such as our toppings and syrups, giving BobaBuddy a cute and approachable aesthetic. Lastly, with our joint industry knowledge about commercial bubble tea production and sales, we were able provide data regarding the sugar levels in each component of the drink making process.
Challenges we ran into
As we wanted to utilize our hand drawn art for our UI, it was tough to integrate the art into our code and ensuring that they function properly. This was also our first timing learning and using React Native, so trying to complete our product was both a fulfilling yet challenging learning experience
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Since we came in mostly blind about react native and learnt on the go, we are very proud that we could form a working application for BobaBuddy. We are also glad that we persevered through to the end for our first hackathon. Lastly, we are quite proud of certain features in our game, such as the bubble tea shaker machine and the interactive receipt showing the user's bubble tea order.
What we learned
This journey has been a tremendous learning curve developing an idea thats uses technologies that was completely foreign to us. We've picked up several skills such as React Native, Javascript, HTML, CSS and Git.
What's next for BobbaBuddy
We plan to introduce more features for bobabuddy, including more toppings realistic to each bubble tea store. The front page could have an option to choose between different bubble tea brands, and selecting each option will bring you to a unique menu specialised to each store.
Additionally, we could look into collaborating with the health promotion board in Singapore to promote lower sugar consumption and a healthier lifestyle. This could go in conjunction with their current efforts to inform Singaporeans of the sugar intake in their drinks through the nutri-grade labels.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.