Munch Buddies!

The goal of Munch Buddies is to promote healthy eating and mental wellness through a fun UI, along with providing users a little bit of nutrition info as well :)

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We'd love if you read through this in its entirety, but we suggest reading "What it does" if you're limited on time

The Boring Stuff (Intro)

  • Christina Zhao - 1st-time hacker - aka "Is cucumber a fruit"
  • Peng Lu - 2nd-time hacker - aka "Why is this not working!!" x 30
  • Matthew Yang - ML specialist - aka "What is an API"

What it does

It's a cross-platform app that can promote mental health and healthier eating habits!

  • Log when you eat healthy food.
  • Feed your "munch buddies" and level them up!
  • Learn about the different types of nutrients, what they do, and which foods contain them.

Since we are not very experienced at full-stack development, we just wanted to have fun and learn some new things. However, we feel that our project idea really ended up being a perfect fit for a few challenges, including the Otsuka Valuenex challenge!

Specifically,

Many of us underestimate how important eating and mental health are to our overall wellness.

That's why we we made this app! After doing some research on the compounding relationship between eating, mental health, and wellness, we were quite shocked by the overwhelming amount of evidence and studies detailing the negative consequences..

We will be judging for the best mental wellness solution that incorporates food in a digital manner. Projects will be judged on their ability to make proactive stress management solutions to users.

Our app has a two-pronged approach—it addresses mental wellness through both healthy eating, and through having fun and stress relief! Additionally, not only is eating healthy a great method of proactive stress management, but another key aspect of being proactive is making your de-stressing activites part of your daily routine. I think this app would really do a great job of that!

Additionally, we also focused really hard on accessibility and ease-of-use. Whether you're on android, iphone, or a computer, it only takes a few seconds to track your healthy eating and play with some cute animals ;)

How we built it

The front-end is react-native, and the back-end is FastAPI (Python). Aside from our individual talents, I think we did a really great job of working together. We employed pair-programming strategies to great success, since each of us has our own individual strengths and weaknesses.

Challenges we ran into

Most of us have minimal experience with full-stack development. If you look at my LinkedIn (this is Matt), all of my CS knowledge is concentrated in machine learning!

There were so many random errors with just setting up the back-end server and learning how to make API endpoints, as well as writing boilerplate JS from scratch.

But that's what made this project so fun. We all tried to learn something we're not that great at, and luckily we were able to get past the initial bumps.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As I'm typing this in the final hour, in retrospect, it really is an awesome experience getting to pull an all-nighter hacking. It makes us wish that we attended more hackathons during college.

Above all, it was awesome that we got to create something meaningful (at least, to us).

What we learned

We all learned a lot about full-stack development (React Native + FastAPI). Getting to finish the project for once has also taught us that we shouldn't give up so easily at hackathons :)

I also learned that the power of midnight doordash credits is akin to magic.

What's next for Munch Buddies!

We have so many cool ideas that we just didn't have the technical chops to implement in time

  • customizing your munch buddies!
  • advanced data analysis on your food history (data science is my specialty)
  • exporting your munch buddies and stats!

However, I'd also like to emphasize that any further work on the app should be done WITHOUT losing sight of the original goal. Munch buddies is supposed to be a fun way to promote healthy eating and wellbeing. Some other apps have gone down the path of too much gamification / social features, which can lead to negativity and toxic competitiveness.

Final Remark

One of our favorite parts about making this project, is that we all feel that it is something that we would (and will) actually use in our day-to-day!

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