Campus Palate

The Auth0 is used for our website login. The documentation was tough to understand.
the Tembo database is used to store all the meals and this is done using DBeaver

Inspiration

The inspirations of the project were the team members themselves. Majority of them are vegetarian and struggled a lot with campus dining services in the first semester because of the limited food options available. This provoked us to create a platform for students to be aware about their diets and where to find the meals.

What it does

Campus Palate helps students navigate their campus dining experience smoothly by taking their dietary requirements and preferences as inputs and then tells them which dining hall matches their preferences the most and what meals they could take to meet their goals and what they could avoid to stay away from their allergies. It also makes the users aware of what various food options they have on campus matching their requirements, so they never have to get bored while following them.

How we built it

We built the project, Campus Palate, using Python and integrated the python program with CSV files from excel using Pandas Library. All the CSV files were saved in the same directory as the python file. We will be uploading the code on GitHub.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenge we faced was the time restriction. The project we took up was hard to complete in just 24 hours because we had to collect data from multiple dining halls on campus and then research the nutritional values of the food items available. Next, we started off by using "Tembo" as the database management of our project [PostgreSQL]. It was a completely new platform for us and we had to use resources available online to figure out the system. That was a tough task for us as we had no prior knowledge of the software. Collaborating was a challenge as well. Since the project was completely software based, all the team members had to code together. Assembling and integrating the individual lines of code was a difficult task. Integrating the back end and the front end of the project was a difficult task as well.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the fact that despite not being able to use "Tembo" as the database management, we were able to store the data we needed on "excel" and use it as our database management. We can also take pride in saying that we were able to switch plans quickly and smoothly and still accomplish our goals for the weekend despite having most of our previous work and efforts on "Tembo" going into vain.

What we learned

The biggest learning we took back from the weekend was that we should test our plans on a smaller scale before progressing much into the project. This would mean that if we cannot figure out how something is going to work out or if something gets stuck, we wouldn't have proceeded a lot until realizing it, so we wouldn't have to start all over again. We also learned that thinking about a backup plan is never a waste of time. In our case, python and excel, our backup plan helped us a lot as the Tembo part of the primary plan didn't work out pretty well.

What's next for Campus Palate

We plan to implement Campus Palate on the main campus of University of Cincinnati and make it available to all UC students. We want to make Campus Palate accessible on our own website instead of locally defined functions. In the future, we want every US university to use Campus Palate on their campuses.