Inspiration
In college, students' primary concerns should be completing their studies, having new experiences, and forming new connections. Unfortunately, on campuses everywhere, including here at Georgetown, there are students who suffer from food insecurity. The steep price of meal plans incentivizes students to buy cheaper plans, but the high price of groceries in the Washington, D.C. area and the inevitable business of the average Georgetown student makes it difficult to purchase substitute products for those skipped meals. At the same time, there are innumerable clubs, primarily cultural clubs, who host free food events and often suffer from low turnout. In hopes of resolving both of these issues at once, our team hoped to create a readily accessible website and calendar that showed all of the upcoming free food events available on campus.
What it does
The vast majority of clubs at Georgetown post their free food events on Facebook. Thus, this program pulls events from Facebook and inputs that information into a Google Calendar. That Google Calendar is then linked onto the website and students are able to copy the events to their personal calendar. On the webpage, there is also a separate page that shows the most recent events and offers additional details.
At the moment, the program is only capable of drawing events from clubs for which our team had administrator access. However, it would ideally be expanded to all clubs on Georgetown's campus, which could be accomplished by either asking a leader from all clubs to cooperate and provide us with a unique Facebook token that would allow us to pull information about events from their page.
How we built it
We used the Facebook and Google APIs to draw events from Facebook Events and then place them on a Google Calendar. Our primary language was Python, but we also used HTML for the creation of the website.
Challenges we ran into
All of the team members had mixed experiences in programming, so it was difficult to arrive upon a common language. Ultimately, our team settled on an equal solution: all members would learn an entirely new language from scratch (Python).
Additionally, we had difficulty linking the Python code that makes up the body of our program to the HTML website. We hoped to use Flask to complete this task, but ultimately ran out of time to complete that. However, the HTML website included in the submission package is merely a placeholder and depicts what the final product would ideally look like.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were able to learn new skills.
What we learned
We learned how to use the Facebook and Google APIs, Python, and Flask.
What's next for O Street Geeks #9
Our group is interested in trying to finalize O Street Eats and making it publically accessible, namely to Georgetown students. The project is currently not complete, but we would like to (1) finish linking our Python and HTML website and (2) gain access to additional clubs' events. With a finalized project, we will hopefully be able to make it accessible to all Georgetown students, and, should it be a success, create a more generalized model that can be implemented in other college campuses.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.