Inspiration

Upperclassmen end up finishing the year with hundreds of leftover food points that are either wasted or used in one meal. Why not put the food points toward something that could do good?

What it does

Every time a student spends money with his or her food points, the cost of the meal (let's say $1.86) is rounded to the nearest dollar and the change ($0.14) is given to charity! Each student can go online and pick their favorite charity out of a predetermined list of 5. Our program funnels this $0.14 to an account that will store the money for that particular charity. We also allow students to set a daily cap, so that once this cap is reached no more money will be donated that day.

How we built it

There are a couple aspects to our project: a) the front end was built and formatted using HTML and CSS. b) the functions of the interface provided was built using javascript. c) the data was stored in a Firebase Realtime Database. d) the communication between the database and our functions was done through javascript.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge as students who haven't taken a software development course was the fullstack aspect, trying to connect our front end and back end with languages that we had to Google. We also were not used to working with a realtime database, which was a tough but exciting challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It was our first Hackathon, and had absolutely no idea what to expect. We learned a lot of new languages and approaches to programming in such a short amount of time, so definitely a rewarding weekend.

What we learned

New languages, working on problem solving as a team, delegating major chunks of responsibilities.

What's next for Food Points for Charity

We want to potentially ask Duke to collaborate on the backend aspect, so that we can actually tap into the Duke ID server. Maybe we can even implement.