SwipeShare

Inspiration:

SwipeShare was inspired by the challenges students face with campus dining: food insecurity, poor budgeting tools, and a surprising number of unused meal swipes and campus dollars that expire every semester. We wanted to create a simple, student-friendly way for people to help each other, designed specifically for sharing campus dining resources.

What it does:

SwipeShare lets students donate or request meal swipes and campus dollars through a simple peer-to-peer system. Students earn points for donating, which encourage engagement and help build connections. Points accumulate over time, allowing students to achieve higher levels as they contribute more. The app features a dashboard with balances, a recent activity chart, campus-wide impact statistics, a Donate/Request flow, a progress rewards system, and SwipeBot—an AI chatbot that provides budgeting tips and affordable dining suggestions.

How we built it:

We built SwipeShare entirely in SwiftUI using Xcode, using GitHub for version control. We designed our UI/UX screens in Figma and planned our user flows and logic in Whimsical. The prototype includes multiple screens, navigation tabs, chart views, impact tracking, and an early version of SwipeBot for student budgeting support.

Challenges we ran into:

Some challenges we faced included streamlining connectivity between multi-screen navigation, implementing charts in SwiftUI, keeping our UI consistent across tabs, and aligning new feature ideas with our design as we built quickly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of:

We are proud that we created a polished iOS prototype that reflects a real solution to student needs. We built a working donation/request flow, designed a clean user interface, integrated an AI assistant, and developed a progress and rewards system. We translated a real student problem into a functional and scalable concept. We also ensured that a part of our functional features is to incentivize students to engage with the application, by implementing a point and progress system that increments based on user actions.

What we learned:

We learned how to develop a multi-screen iOS app with SwiftUI, and how to convert Figma designs into functional features. We also learned how to collaborate effectively under time pressure and pivot when we encountered set-up challenges with our initial platform. On the technical side, we gained experience programming modular applications with files that communicate across screens, enabling updates to data on multiple views. We also learned to adapt our scope to fit our challenges and tackle UI/UX problems, focusing on features that provide the most impact within the hackathon timeline.

What's next for Cloud5 - SwipeShare:

Next steps include adding secure login for users based on their campus, building a full backend and database, expanding our analytics and impact statistics, and integrating with official university dining systems. We also plan to add more AI budgeting features, and achievements.