Bovey School Meals

Inspiration

School day mornings can be stressful! It's usually a rush and an important part of it is deciding what the little one's lunch will be. The choice is usually between the school provided meal or a homemade packed lunch, and the decision typically involves complex factors like "I don't like tomato" and "Frank never eats rice and I always eat what Frank eats"!

To make things even more challenging, UK schools publish their lunch menus in complex PDFs with repeating meals plans depending on the weeks. You need sometime to get your head around it, even if you're familiar with them.

So, I decided to use Alexa to help!

What it does

It tells you what the Bovey Tracey Primary School lunch menu is. You can ask for any date in the future, as long as the school published it. It also allows friendly words like "tomorrow" and "next Friday".

How I built it

The school menu PDFs are loaded into an AWS DynamoDB store. An AWS Lambda then interfaces it with Alexa.

Challenges I ran into

Nothing really, it was pretty straightforward. The cumbersome PDFs were actually the most challenging part!

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Making mine and my wife's morning a bit less stressful! And also being able to make calmer and informed decisions about our little one's lunch, which has a healthier impact.

Hopefully this will be used by other parents in the community, and hopefully they will get the same benefits we're getting.

What's next for Bovey School Meals

The meals plans are similar for many other schools in Devon County, and maybe even in the UK. It might be straightforward to extend this skill to more schools.

Built With

• aws-dynamodb
• aws-lambda