NourishU

Inspiration

Food insecurity is a growing issue on college campuses as is food waste. We wanted to help alleviate the symptoms of food insecurity by bringing forth a system to donate and receive meals through the university's pre-existing dining system.

What it does

Our web based application which we would ideally make into an app, allows students to donate an unused meal every single day to other university students. With a priority system based on the student's financial status, those who need meals most are prioritized.

How we built it

We have a sql database, containing account data, which lets you login to the app. In a perfect world, this would allow you to connect to your UD account, and thus your Dining Plan.

Once you logon, you would be prompted to donate/receive a meal at certain times a day. For instance the first prompt asking for donors might be 2:00pm. Once someone agrees to donate a meal, it is sent into the shared DonationPool, where it sits until it finds a recipient.

Once a recipient is found, they are given a reservation to that meal, allowing them to scan a QR code/ Bar code, allowing them to redeem the meal. Every expiration has an expiry timer, so that if someone didn't end up using that meal, it would go in the pool for the next day.

The recipients are decided based off of a base priority which is dependent on their meal plan, and a pity system. This essentially makes it so that if you were to get really unlucky for multiple pools in a row, you have a higher chance of winning. Once you win the pity is cleared, and you are set back to your base priority.

Challenges we ran into

Initially we tried to use flutter, however decided that it wouldn't get done fast enough. We then pivoted to a website just to get the idea across. Setting up the SQL and PHP authentication took a while, as I had a lot of configuration issues on my end.