Opportuno

event detail
leaderboard
landing page
interactive map
submission form

Inspiration

One evening, as we sat at the tables in the campus recreation center, we picked up some free samples of food that was part of a new restaurant opening promotion. A few hours later, we noticed how the staff begin to pack up, but instead of packing the leftover samples, it was all discarded in the trash -- 10 servings worth of food which could have been consumed by hungry students were just discarded. This was not the first time it happened and such is a cause of unnecessary food waste. One possible solution to counter this problem is to inform other hungry college students on campus about leftover food from events/promotions. Some group chats exist for this reason, but they are exorbitantly large and have a lot of spam with very little moderation. Our idea was to create an app powered by the community with custom alerts and more organization.

What it does

The app will list any current public events on campus providing free food/samples to students. Other students can add events or update the status of currently running events. Contributing to the database gives users more points which can be used to unlock perks.

How we built it

We used Flutter on VS Code to develop an android app which has four pages. The home page lists all the current events offering free food on campus with live updates of its status. The leaderboard shows the rankings of all the contributors to the database. An interactive map (powered by a Google Maps API) shows the location of these events. A form to create an event is also available.

Challenges we ran into

We initially started coding on Android studio which turned out to make our work more complicated. We were also discussing what a good method for storing data would be. Eventually, we settled for flutter which was integrated into VS Code making it more convenient for everyone to make his/her contributions and decided to use a local database for the demonstration.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are three EE majors that created an app from scratch in less than 36 hours with little to no prior experience in app development and hackathons. If this has taught us anything, it is that we can learn and achieve greatly with the right motivation and drive.

What we learned

Working with a tight deadline created a lot of pressure for our team, but we learned how to strive through struggles while also having a lot of fun. Communication was super important and celebrating the little things motivated us to keep going.

What's next for Opportuno

The beautiful part about this idea is that it can be scaled and improved a lot. Some of the ideas we want to implement include a sorting algorithm, a proximity filter, a cross-checking feature that eliminates duplicates or updates existing events, and a point system. Given more time, we would have wanted to create an online database.