Inspiration
We found that many of our friends who ate consistently at the dining halls were looking to track their macros, such as how much protein they were getting in a day and how many calories they were consuming so they could help plan out their diet. However many of them gave up on tracking and eventually gave up their diets because it was too much work to click into each menu at each of the commons and manually calculate what they were eating in a day. We wanted to help our friends and the rest of UMass to stay healthy and have an easier time tracking their macros with our integrated website, Minute Macros.
What it does
Essentially, Minute Macros is a calorie and macro tracker that has access to all the food in the dining halls and each of the macros in the food, so that students can easily keep track of how much and what exactly they're eating.
How we built it
We started with logic, so scraping the UMass dining website and inputting the nutrient info we found for each dining hall and for each day, into a dataset, which we then used a calorie and macro tracker code we wrote to iterate through and offer the user options to track how much of what they ate and see their total macros as well as offer dietary advice based off their dietary needs. This was all displayed in a website which we coded, putting all three steps together, to find the data, make use of the data through the calorie tracker and display the data to the user in a way that was helpful to them.
Challenges we ran into
Our first and biggest challenge was scraping the data off of the UMass webiste, parsing through the large amounts of HTML code and scraping it for the nutrient information we were trying to find and display. Our next challenge was putting this data together with our code that made use of the data, and making sure that we could correctly display what we wanted to to the user for each specific use case and accomodate all types of diets one might see at UMass. Finally, our last challenge was to put this together in a visually appealing way for the user in our website, so that it all flowed well and was a useful tool for our UMass family.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are very proud that we were able to put this all together in the time constraints we had, and actually build a successful scraper that could perform api HTML extraction on the UMass menu. We were also proud that we could use this data successfully in our program, and offer real world solutions to students in a visually appealing and useful website.
What we learned
We learned a lot about workflow as a team for sure, splitting up our project between the three of us, one handling the scraping of the website, which we learned a lot about such as how to properly parse HTML and extract desired data using BeautifulSoup and working with pandas to make the information we found a dataset. Additionally, we learned a lot about how to add our program into a physical website and how to display the hardcoded information to the user. Essentially we learned a lot about working with HTML, website scraping, programming functions for calculators and building user friendly websites.
What's next for Minute Macros
We hope that this project will be used by UMass and UMass dining, and that we can get even more information about upcoming foods so that we can have the tracker used by students and staff and all that use UMass dining regularly. It would mean a lot to us to see our friends and all of our peers and fellow Minutemen be able to use this tool regularly and improve their health while doing so.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.