Dine N Dash

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West Village 1
West Village 2

Inspiration

During the first few weeks of classes, the lines at all the dining halls on campus were extremely long. It was extremely difficult to try and get food and still make it to classes on time. This app helps mitigate that issue.

What it does

This app provides users with the current wait time and reviews of every dining hall on Georgia Tech's campus. Users can leave input and feedback so other users can determine the best dining hall for a meal on a given day.

How we built it

We used Xcode IDE and used Swift to build this app. We had to build the UI and program the various aspects of the app to perform in the ways we intended them to.

Challenges we ran into

We wanted to use router networks to try and give extremely accurate data but realized this was something that wasn't feasible given the time constraints and security restrictions surrounding this project. We were forced to search for alternative methods and ended up using GPS to reach our goals with this app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was the first hackathon for all members of our team, and we were extremely nervous coming into the competition. Additionally, we were not accustomed to the swift language prior to this event and had to learn much of it as we were working on our project. We are extremely proud to create a functioning app at the end of this event.

What we learned

We learned a lot about the app development process and how to plan our approach to ensure a smoother development cycle. We encountered a lot of issues that we should have expected, and moving forward, we will expect these kinds of issues in similar projects.

What's next for Dine N Dash

Moving forward, we want to build upon this project and expand it into something more powerful and more meaningful. The first step of this would be to implement an API that would allow us to add alerts and messaging functionalities to our app. This would allow us to remind or recommend certain actions to users given their preferences. We could also use other information like the current wait time, time of day, and location of the user to provide the most efficient method of obtaining food. We would also like to incorporate the menu of each dining hall into our app, allowing the user to see more information about each dining hall on our app. Lastly, once we clean up the app and ensure that it works in the way we intend it to, we would like to expand it to include other food options on campus including the student center and exhibition hall. If this goes smoothly, we would like to take our app to other college campuses as well.