Davis Food

Inspiration

Dining food can sometimes not be the best specially after a long day of classes. Sometimes you just want to go into the dining hall and enjoy some food. The descriptions can also be misleading to what the actual food for the day is. Having a way for students to see the menu and rate the food would allow other students to see what dining hall is serving the best food for the day and help them make an easier choice with less disappointment.

What it does

We get the daily food menu for all the dining halls at UC Davis. Then they are sorted by the one that has the highest combined rating for their food. Students are able to see the menu from breakfast lunch and dinner and see the individual rating of each food given by other students. They are also able to rate the food themselves. This allows for them to be able to choose better food options.

How we built it

We used a python web scraper to get the food options in json format. This information was then stored in a database which we used to pull the data for our iOS app. The ratings for the individual items are also stored and the final rating is used from crowdsourcing the rating of all the students.

Challenges we ran into

Web Scraping was really difficult because the way the Dining Hall website was organized made it really hard to index into the certain items. Furthermore, there were some formatting and inconsistency on the websites part, making it harder to have clean data for our app. Additionally, we didn't know much Javascript so it was challenging having to learn JS and also make the app in 24 hours.