Clean Plate

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  Clean Plate

Inspiration

As college students who regular consume our meals in dining halls, we notice how much food waste is generated every day, both in during the preparation and consumption phases. With the university's emphasis on sustainability and environmental protection, we feel impelled to decrease the food waste level, as we know how precious food is and the fact that there are many people around the world who don't have enough access to food and struggling in such circumstances. This program serves as our attempt to address this issue and increase awareness about it so that more people can learn about it, become more conscious of whether they are wasting food on a daily basis and make improvements from there.

What it does

This app serves as a tracker tool that allows the user to input their food waste level every day, and provides a statistic summary of the food waste level based on user input. Then, over time, the user can track their food waste level and reflect upon that.

How we built it

This app was built using Java and a simple GUI was implemented, which interactive features that facilitate user input.

Challenges we ran into

Through this process, we ran into a lot of challenges specifically regarding the building of the GUI, which is not the strongest feature of Java as a programming language. Therefore, we tried to make the GUI more presentable and appealing for user interactions. In addition, due to limited time, we did not try to connect the program to a database. Instead, we work on storing the user data into a file on user's local disk and work from there.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the works that we have done to raise awareness about food waste. We recognize that the program has certain limitations and many areas of improvements due to limited time. But we are proud to be able to create a program that highlight this important social issue and make people know about how food waste can be addressed through software and daily habits. The main point of this program is to stress that food waste is not to be addressed through a single day's work, but incrementally over time.

What we learned

We learned valuable lessons through this Hackathon, the most important being the perseverance. Through this time-limited Hackathon, we encountered numerous challenges during the coding process and think about the various ways we could have addressed these problems. There are also a lot of features we want to include in our program, where we were not able to include for all of them due to limited time. Thus, we took careful considerations to make the most effective use of time so that we can still present the best program.

What's next for Food Tracker

Food Tracker is definitely an idea that can be expanded more and developed into a fully functional app, preferably connected to a database with more visual features in the future, which will then allow the user to log into their account and visualize their waste patterns in greater detail. We remain hopeful and exciting for the future of Food Tracker, and hope to pursue this project after further developing our coding skills.

Built With

• java