Gleenr

Inspiration

One of our teammates has a really big lemon tree in their backyard, and they were explaining how they wanted to share those lemons with others. Being able to share fruits or vegetables that aren't used lowers food waste and allows people to help better their communities.

What it does

Gleaning is known as the process of giving excess produce from farms and providing them to people in need.

In Gleenr, we take this idea a step further by encouraging regular citizens to share their excess gardened produce. It is a website that allows people to create events for gleaning. There are two types of events: communal market and one-on-one. These two events allow users to decide how they want to meet with gardeners and farmers. Communal markets are comprised of multiple people or organizations who are offering their products, whereas one-on-one would be for regular people who would like to give away excess produce from their gardens.

The website also provides a list of upcoming gleaning events- both one-on-one or communal. Users are expected to RSVP to these events to receive their produce. There is also has a donations section, which will allow donations to be made to organizations that promote gleaning, like Backyard Bounty and Glean SLO.

How we built it

We built our website on Wix, which is a website-building app. Our main focus was user experience, so we focused more on the aesthetics of the project.

Challenges we ran into

Originally, the team had planned to use Ionic Angular to create a Web App. However, Ionic would not download easily onto our team's computers. Once ionic was downloaded on one of our teammate's computers, they had difficulty navigating the web code because they had only previously had experience with Java and Python. So, we scrapped that idea because it wasn't very beginner-friendly.

Then, we moc=ved onto trying to write a website using Atomic. However, that would mean having to completely learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on the spot. We spent about six hours working on the HTML code but didn't get halfway through it.

At that point, due to time logistics, we decided to use Wix to design our website. We figured that instead of trying to "reinvent the wheel", we would design a website that had an easily navigatable interface. This website is a very basic representation of the properties we expect a fully-fleshed website to have.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Although we were not able to complete previous codes, we are proud of our ability to give those methods an honest try. Also, we are proud of how original our idea. It is a real-life solution that could be used to help better the lives of people. For example, the City of Merced promotes gleaning as a sustainable way to prevent food waste, and this website could help the City organize and promote gleaning to the general public.

What we learned

For Ionic, we spent approximately 11 hours attempting to understand how to code with almost little to nothing to show for it. For our HTML code, we understood that the time barrier that we would face attempting to have an aesthetically pleasing, easy to access interface. HOWEVER, instead of looking at these things as a negative, our team recognizes the effort we put in to attempt to solve this problem through coding by hand. We now know what we need to learn so that we can create amazing websites on our own in the future.

What's next for Gleenr

Gleenr is currently just an idea, but it doesn't have just stay an idea. The promotion of gleaning allows people to find easily accessible, affordable food. This idea is an excellent way to help organize gleaning events, which brings a social aspect to the subject. Our team considers this a realistic project, and we would like to see it come to life. This may be through selling our idea to companies that could help it become a reality, or giving the idea to a nonprofit that specializes in gleaning.

Built With

• wix