PrepPal

Inspiration

Our inspiration sprouted from our local UCI community of hardworking students. We noticed that many students struggle to find motivation to cook due to their busy schedules. And so we wanted to create PrepPal, a meal planner that helps students find inspiration to nourish themselves!

What it does

Based on a specific preparation time and dietary restrictions, the application uses the Suggestic API to look for recipes to fit the user's needs. PrepPal analyzes the data provided by the API and returns a daily meal plan that consists of a meal, its calories, the ingredients needed, and the instructions to create it.

How we built it

We utilized React/HTML/CSS/JavaScript to create our frontend that displays the user interface. On the backend, we utilized FastApi, Insomniac, and Python to sort and organize the data we received through the Suggestic API.

Challenges we ran into

Frontend

The process of not only learning the different languages but also translating HTML/CSS/JS to React was a difficult challenge. We didn't realize that translating the languages would be difficult after splitting up the work for different web pages.

Backend

On the backend, the majority of the time consisted of learning how to work with GraphQL and what the API consisted of. The API had specific functionality that we had to incorporate into FastAPI and organizing the data took up most of our time.

Connection

Connecting the frontend and backend was also a struggle and with the time limitation, it was difficult to efficiently get the two aspects to work together.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of learning these languages to produce a beautiful UI. We're also proud of being able to work with a new API and organize its data. It was our first hackathon and we learned a lot of skills within a small timeframe.

What we learned

As a team, we were able to successfully learn how to communicate and collaborate. We expressed what we needed from each other and motivated one another to learn new things! As individuals, we learned how to work with new languages and continued to practice our problem solving skills. Notably, working with APIs and React was a new experience for us but we were able to accomplish a lot!

What's next for PrepPal?

PrepPal was a great collaborative project for our team and we hope to continue learning more about how these different components work together. And with that, we hope that PrepPal potentially has the opportunity to fully develop!