GiveWay: One Route, Many Meals

We are tackling the epidemic of food scarcity. With our "UberEats" style of food delivery we balance the convenience of our volunteers and our mission of providing food to those in need.

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Inspiration

As a group, asked a simple question: “How can we connect students and people in need of food with food drives/ people willing to donate?” That challenge turned into GiveWay.

What it does

  • Students or community members request a meal.
  • Drivers sign in, see the closest requests, and follow one optimized route.

How we built it

  • Flask for the API and page routing.
  • OpenRouteService to geocode addresses and build raw routes.
  • Leaflet to draw the map.
  • Bulma + vanilla CSS for the UI.
  • In‑memory dictionaries keep student and volunteer data for the demo.

Challenges we ran into

  • API rate limits, solved by caching geocode results.
  • Merge conflicts while four people edited the same HTML file.
  • Balancing “looks good” with “loads on a phone with spotty Wi‑Fi.”

Accomplishments we’re proud of

  • Added a live carbon‑saved counter in one evening.
  • Slide‑out nav, color‑blind theme toggle, and mobile view all work.
  • One‑click “Seed demo data” lets judges test without signup pain.

What we learned

  • WebSockets are worth the setup when the data is live.
  • Clear commit messages prevent half the Git pain we caused ourselves.

What’s next for GiveWay

  • Deploy on Render with Postgres instead of in‑memory data.
  • SMS alerts: “Driver is 5 min away.”
  • Turn recipients into future drivers with a “Pay‑it‑Forward” toggle.

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