What is Leafy?

Leafy is a mobile application that caters to the needs of both farmers attempting to get rid of produce they may not use and communities that lack direct access to truly nutritional foods. Leafy's slick design combined with its intricate SQLite database system, allows for seamless user experience

What inspired us?

Leafy was inspired by many of our members’ experience in researching and volunteering in areas of food insecurity. Guilford County has a vast difference between those who have an abundance of food, which often leads to food waste, and those who suffer from food insecurity. Additionally, North Carolina is home to many food desserts, which often affects those in lower socioeconomic classes to a greater extent. We built Leafy in order to allow those with an excess of food, specifically fresh produce, to donate to those who otherwise couldn’t afford it.

What we learned?

Through the development of Leafy, we garnered many technical and non-technical skills. We learned how to manage our individual goals for the project through the use of a KanBan board. This system allowed us to be fully transparent with one another and face our problems as a team. We also learned skills in React-Native, such as building components on separate pages and creating and accessing an SQLite Database throughout our code.

How we built our project

We built our project by brainstorming all the features needed to make our app easy to use and fulfill its purpose. We created all of our code on VsCode and tested it on an Android Virtual Device (Pixel 6). We broke our code down into the individual screens and the functions to complete tasks, such as gathering user input and creating queries. Additionally, we used CRUD database operations to effectively handle each entry into our database. With future plans of an interactive map, users can see places with excess produce ready to donate.

Challenges we faced as a team

We faced many challenges in every stage when developing Leafy. The main challenge we faced was conflicting schedules- as all of our members have a multitude extracurriculars and belong to a very time intensive academic program, it was difficult managing those and the building of the app. We faced many technical challenges, such as linking the database tables with the front end and even finding a platform that best suits our needs. Overall, we were able to work as a team to overcome every issue we encountered, in turn making every single one of us a better developer for the future.