MunchPoints

Fight food insecurity together, one point at a time.

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Inspiration

Summer is finally upon us, which means different things for different people. One notable thing about the season though, is that McDonald's has brought back their 1$ ice cream coupon. Like many other restaurants / fast food chains, McDonald's has a points / coupon system to encourage customers to buy some of their products.

So why not apply a similar idea to fight food insecurity? We thought it'd be cool if there was a centralized platform that could connect students to businesses who were interested in not only attracting the student population but also in helping to ease their food insecurity.

What it does

Basically, the platform works on points. When a student user makes a purchase at a MunchPoint registered restaurant, the user gains points that they can then use for a discount at that same restaurant. They can also get points for completing other tasks, such as posting a review (for the first time) on a restaurant's page. To accomplish this, there are two types of accounts that can be created on the platform: restaurant (business) and student (user) accounts. As a business account, you can scan barcodes to identify user accounts, and choose to either give points or apply a discount. On the other hand, student accounts are equipped with a dashboard where they can see the restaurants that they are "subscribed" (can receive points from) to, a barcode for identification, and extra features to better know the restaurants available to them on the platform.

How we built it

To build the project, we used React, Javascript (and TypeScript), CSS, MongoDB, Nodejs, Express, Mongoose, MongoDB Atlas, and some libraries. Also a lot of Google.

Challenges we ran into

Keeping track of how the project was organized (what information was in which collection of the db, remembering where we had implemented a certain functionality), was definitely difficult because of the time constraint. It was our first hackathon, so we definitely felt the pressure all throughout development, which inevitably made it harder to concentrate compared to how we might have under different circumstances. Figuring out how to implement certain functionalities (ex: barcode scan) was also challenging.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're honestly really happy that we were able to build this over the weekend. To see something we brainstormed actually turn into a product we can interact with is definitely a huge accomplishment for us, and we are very proud :)

What we learned

React contexts, UI/UX design, how db collections are related, time management, working under pressure, separating tasks and using GitHub to better work together.

What's next for MunchPoints

Since we have designed this app for mobile, it would be cool to actually deploy it as a mobile app!

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