ServeIT

Inspiration

Teenagers like ourselves and donors to charitable organizations are challenged by time crunches in their everyday lives that prevent them from being able to volunteer and donate–respectively–as often as they would like. Additionally, our community faces the pressing issues of food insecurity and landfill wastage. Our hometown of Greensboro ranks 14th in the nation for food insecurity, and our landfills are rapidly filling up, as by 2036, all U.S landfills are predicted to be completely full.

What it does

Our app ServeIT addresses the large-scale issues of food insecurity and growing landfills by optimizing the donation delivery process with teenage drivers. Our app helps bridge the distance and time gaps between resources of willing donors and those in need by delivering donations to charitable organizations in local communities, ensuring that no community member goes hungry. It effectively connects members from three distinct groups--teenagers, donors, charitable orgs.

How we built it

We used the 'no-code' platform FlutterFlow to build and design our app, Python scripts for our backend hosted on Amazon AWS, and Google Firebase to store and manage our data inputted from donors and drivers. Additionally, to manage the issue of multiple teens and donors using our app, we utilized an AI constraint optimization solver called Timefold to create optimal routes for all drivers based on donor and driver constraints.

Challenges we ran into

In the process of deciding which app development platform to use, we ran into issues with multiple platforms that either offered limited functionality or were too complex for our needs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of being able to successfully live test our app with our first ServeIT teen and multiple donors in the Greensboro area, as well as our partnering with a local charitable organization.

What we learned

We learned how to set both realistic and ambitious goals and hold each other to meeting these goals so we could be consistent and efficient in our work.

What's next for ServeIT

We plan to add more features to our app such as a tracking system for parents of teen drivers and a more comprehensive confirmation system, and expand across the entire state of North Carolina through chapter-based leadership.

Built With

• amazon-web-services
• firebase
• flixier
• flutterflow
• python
• timefold
• vscode