Food Expiration

Inspiration

We wanted to create something that would encompass all three tracks of this hackathon. We created an app for college students that help them keep track of food expiration dates. We want to make sure that these college students are living healthy lives and at the same time limiting as much food waste as possible that already exists in this world.

What it does

It allows the student to enter the name of the food and the pick its expiration date via a date picker. The student can then add the item and the item would show up on a list in the app. The idea is for the date to be saved in a database and notify the user when the expiration date has passed.

How we built it

This is the very first hackathon for all of our team members. This is also the very first time that are team used Android Studio. We used Android Studio for the front end design of the project while we used java for the back end interactions. We were able to use android studio as a whole to connect the front end to the back end.

Challenges we ran into

Since this was our very first time using Android Studio, we ran into many problems. For example, two of the members learned how to script in XML Syntax while building the user interface map. Another example would be one of our team member's desire to use a more complex data structure to store the data, but realized that there were simpler solutions to go around it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team is proud to say that we were able to code and demo something at our very first hackathon! We came into this hackathon ready and open to learn and experience as much as we can. We're also really proud to have tackled the basics of Android Studio, despite learning and using for the first time ever.

What we learned

We learned that sometimes simplicity is the way to go. We may have a lot of ideas that we want to incorporate in a project, but they can be too complex at times especially for our limited skill set. We also learned that hackathons are really fun and we're definitely looking forward to developing this app further or even starting another project at our next hackathon.

What's next for Food Expiration

Next for Food Expiration is to find a way to display the date after the user has selected it through the date picker. Another feature we'd like to add is a way to have the app to notify the user that the food has expired as well as an edit button that will allow the user to edit and delete items in their list.