food4all

Inspiration

As college students, we are aware of our peers' difficulties: adjusting to college life, balancing our responsibilities, and of course, staying afloat. We wanted to create an application that would help make college life more accessible, and something that we discovered that affects a number of students is food insecurity. Food accessibility not only takes away some stress, but it helps keeps students healthy and energized to power through their classes.

What it does

In food4all, it allows students to be able to find food pantries nearby so that they can have their meals even if they are on the go. The application has a feature that accepts monetary and food donations that powers the cycle of giving. Users that plan to donate monetary donations will be redirected to a page that gives them choices on what food they want their donations to go towards.

How we built it

We started by jotting down ideas and thoughts on what we wanted our application to do. Then, we used Figma to create a layout that implemented the design ideas that we wanted to integrate into our application. From that, we were able to build our HTML and CSS with designs that we believe best fit the users' experience.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges that we encountered were trouble finding what programming language or application we should use to produce our output, and encountered difficulties in integrating our code into different platforms. Despite these difficulties, we were able to work together as a group—discussing and helping each other however we can.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

During our time in this hackathon, we ended up being really proud of the UI design mockup that Katherine made. It really surpassed any of the expectations that we had for what the website might look like. We also had a lot of ideas, as well as different ways to address the issues that we were focused on. All those ideas were really good, and we are proud of ourselves for trying to come up with a project, given the time constraints and the abundance of ideas.

What we learned

For most of us, as this was our first hackathon, the entire event enabled us to discover new things about technology. During our group discussions, we were exposed to framework applications such as Flask, and UI applications such as Anima and Figma. Furthermore, we learned a lot from one another because when a teammate is unfamiliar with something, another is proficient in it. This hackathon enabled us to learn new aspects of technology, while also growing our knowledge of something that we are already familiar with.

What's next for food4all

Our future plan for food4all is to integrate a group chat that enables students to reach out to one another if there is food that they would like to share or hand out. Moreover, we want to make our application open to donations from corporations to get more people involved. Similarly, we want our app to provide help to students on a wider scale, so we hope to work on making it available on campuses in different states.

UI demo with Katherine Chiu

UI demo on loom

This link goes to a video that our UI/UX designer created to show off our UI design. Please go to this link to see what the Figma mockup looks like.

Built With

• css
• domain.com
• figma
• github
• html
• javascript