FOODSECURE

FOOD SECURE

Inspiration

The habit of sleeping late to directly wake up at lunch is not news to college grads. Millions of students all over the country struggle with crippling student debt or shortage of cash during their college days. This significantly impacts their eating and nutrition habits. The idea for skipping meals to save bucks is extremely alluring to the younger generation who don't immediately realize the negative impacts of losing out on daily calorie needs. This often leads to unnoticed decrease in productivity and lesser grades. Many times such habits can reflect clearly when causing problems like low body weight or early glasses due to lower nutrition intake. This scene pushed us towards creating a place for students and alike where they can find resources such as awesome deals or free meals nearby. Often we have newer restaurants and groceries or snack shops trying to make their presence felt in the market. We wanted them to have a platform to reach the student community to spread their word. Also we wanted to make tasks easier for the many donors who are concerned about similar issues and wanted to lend their support to the student community.

What it does

Worried about skipping breakfast to save a few bucks? Fret not. FOODSECURE is here to help. With donations pouring from benefactors all over the country and sparkly new restaurants offering crazy student deals - FOOD SECURE helps you achieve your calorie needs without breaking the bank ! The website has an elegant homepage where users can easily use the navigation bar to quickly switch between different pages. The homepage has a lucid description about the food insecurity problem faced by the student community. A seamless scroll reveals various other features available throughout the website like donations, resources and support. Next we have few pictures and a short video expressing the concerns related to food insecurity. The footer has the contact us info, quick links and social media handles. Our highlight is the deals page which has an assortment of various deals , free meals and promotions available. Students can use this page navigate through all the deals and gather the requisite info. Then there is the donation page which has a form where willing users can donate to the cause of solving food insecurity. Finally we have a blog where the food insecurity team continuously updates its users about the latest development and upcoming offers.

How we built it

A complete website from scratch which includes a complex combination of HTML, CSS, node.js, express.js (framework of node.js), EJS( Embedded Java Script) and mongo DB. Each component served a unique purpose in the website. Execution was all about proper interaction between front end and back end tools. Nodejs and express was mostly used for server end programming where hosting and interaction between various front end tools was maintained for the smooth interaction between server and client. EJS was used to make the website dynamic by embedding Java script in a predefined template built using front end tools. Html and CSS were used for the entirety of the frontend and the designs seen across each of the pages. Mongoose an ODM library of Mongo DB was used to provide a database. There is a section in the site where there is an option to compose blogs and share your experience. Mongoose was used to store all the composed posts in the database so that every time a new post is composed all previous posts and blogs are also available for the user to read.

Challenges we ran into

Since this was our first hackathon, the entire process felt completely new to us. We stumbled across many roadblocks starting from making ourselves familiar to discord (which we had never used before) to implementing EJS for providing the layouts for our web pages. We were unsure at every step and had to take help from message boards and other hackers. The primary challenge faced was the time limit. Initially we had many features and sections planned which had to be later skipped like the donating food page and resources. Also we got so caught up in building the blog and its database that we weren't left with any time for furnishing the deals page. The CSS was extremely hard to implement on the donations page since none of our team members were brushed up in designing skills and had more inclination towards backend development. We also were hoping to integrate an actual payment gateway but were unsuccessful due to the lack of time and technical complications.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of having made something that society can benefit from in the long run.

What we learned

We have learnt the importance of proper planning and using the right collaboration tools.

What's next for FOODSECURE

We are really hoping to implement a payment gateway in the donations page and want to make the deals page more responsive and dynamic. We also want to implement a verification page for restaurants to submit their promotions to the admin.