Inspiration
Dining hall food can be unpredictable. Which dining hall is good, or which food section is good, can have varying opinions. At times, the food might taste like the worst slop that will ever kiss your tastebuds or the best ever tasting food in our lives. CampusEats is dedicated to giving users real-time reviews and ratings of different dining hall food across different dining halls in universities across Michigan.
What it does
The users are presented with a welcome page. Once clicking on a button, users are prompted to select which Michigan College Campus they want to check food reviews at (Michigan State, U of M, Wayne, etc). Then, users are prompted to select their preferred dining hall (Case, Brody, Shaw etc.) then the stall at which they want to see/make reviews (GLP, Slices, VegOut etc.) Users then can see real time ratings of the stall or the Dining Hall as a whole as well as write their own with pictures.
How we built it
The web application was developed using React, a JavaScript library, and features various components for users to rate and track food experiences at different universities and dining halls. Users can select a university, choose a dining hall, and rate specific food categories. The application supports customization by allowing users to add new universities, dining halls, and food categories. The background color dynamically changes based on the selected university. The code incorporates features like mouse tracking, rating forms, and popups, enhancing the overall user experience. The CSS styles define the layout and appearance of the components, contributing to the design of the food rating web application.
Challenges we ran into
Obviously, making the entire code, front-end and back-end, was a real challenge. Most members of the team are moderately experienced and had no experience in website building whatsoever. For starters, finding an API for the MSU Eat At State website was impossible. Unlike the U of M website, MSU had no API so it was more challenging. In the end, we settled for manually typing in all the dining halls and stalls for the MSU Campus. Not only the back-end developing was hard, but finding something to test the CSS and JS code was tricky too. After pulling an all-nighter, we finally got the website to work.
What's next for CampusEats
As of now, CampusEats only shows Michigan Universities. However, in the future, there is scope that this website can be used for any college campus in the country with a dining hall and using crowd-sourced data.
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