Hamster Chooses My Lunch

• 

  Indecision killer - Reveals a random place to eat, if in doubt.

• 

  Girl/Boy math justifier - Justifies user spending

• 

  Live Heatmap - Visual indicator of crowd conditions at respective canteens

• 

  For the socially anxious...

• 

  Users gain points for each rating given. A real-time leaderboard reveals our top-rater

• 

  Rating page - Users can give stalls a rating, comes with a stall owner (Auntie's) mood indicator

• 

  Home page - better demonstrated in real time

Inspiration

We were inspired by the lack of fun and engaging dining apps in NUS. Most tools are either too functional or too serious, while the real problem students face is decision fatigue and social awkwardness when choosing what to eat. We wanted something light-hearted, local, and genuinely enjoyable to use.

What it does

"Hamster Chooses My Lunch" helps NUS students decide what to eat by organising food stalls by location and adding playful decision-making features. For example, users can spin a wheel to randomly choose a stall, browse anonymously reviewed stalls, and reduce the stress of picking food. The app turns a mundane daily decision into something quick and fun.

How we built it

We built the app mainly using Streamlit, which allowed us to rapidly prototype and deploy an interactive web application. We structured the app around location-based views, simple data handling, and lightweight UI components to keep things intuitive and responsive.

Challenges we ran into

This was our first time working with Streamlit, and we only discovered it on the day we started the project. We had to quickly learn how its layout, state management, and components worked while building at the same time, which was challenging but rewarding.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite the steep learning curve, we managed to make the app feel seamless and easy to use. The core features work smoothly together, and the overall experience feels playful rather than clunky, which was our main goal.

What we learned

We learnt that sometimes you just have to take the bold first step and build with unfamiliar tools. Rapid experimentation and learning on the fly can be more effective than over-planning, especially in a hackathon setting.

What's next for Hamster Chooses My Lunch

Next, we want to expand the feature set with richer reviews, more fun visual elements like hamster memes, and smarter weighting for recommendations. We also hope to refine the UI further and explore deploying it as a more permanent campus-wide tool.

Built With

• geminiapi
• python
• streamlit