Hoos Got Food

Engineer's Way

Inspiration

The idea for HoosGotFood originated because our team has noticed that after major university-sponsored events a lot of food can go to waste. Our aim was to create a web page that takes information from people hosting events that have leftover food and compiles that information in one place. Thus, this website would serve as a central location for people to know where to go to get the leftover food. This type of site could be particularly beneficial to students who suffer from financial difficulties. It would also greatly help reduce UVA's food waste problem.

What it does

The website would allow users to update locations with leftover food from their events, as well as check out whether there is any other food available on Grounds.

How we built it

We started with an HTML webpage using knowledge garnered from the Web Development Workshop at HooHacks. Next, we started adding buttons and titles, using online resources to make stylistic changes in CSS. For the Google Map, we used code from W3Schools, which we edited by adding parameters to make the button change the map every time it was clicked. We looked up the latitude and longitude for locations on Grounds, passing them as parameters. The buttons contained an "onclick" component, so each time it was clicked, the map would depict the corresponding latitude and longitude coordinates.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into several challenges as first-time hackers. One of the main challenges was that we were unfamiliar with most web development platforms/languages. To combat this, we attended the Beginner Web Development workshop where we got some experience with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We then decided to use these tools to create our basic web page, although we had to simplify our original idea.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to learn basic functions of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in a short period of time. We are also proud that we were able to integrate an aspect of the Google Cloud Platform (maps).

What we learned

HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and basic functions of the Google Cloud Platform

What's next for Hoos Got Food

We would like to implement what we were not able to do due to our limited experience. These features include making the website more interactive (i.e. able to actually know where food is available), providing updates regarding the locations/quantities of the food available, and eventually maybe expanding it to other universities.