Slug Swap

As college students attending UCSC for 3 years, it was our first time dealing with a currency that was new and unique to us. Learning how to manage SlugPoints and calculating the perfect amount to spend every week was fun, but also created a lot of stress! As freshman we would compare our meal swipes to make sure we could spend just the right amount at the end of every quarter.

Slug Swap mitigates this stress and helps students like us plan and also find other students who need help spending or giving away their meal swipes and SlugPoints. With this app, it makes connecting with others easier and encourages students to meet more users!

We started our build in a Google Doc planning what applications would be useful to college students attending UCSC. We drafted several ideas, but at last, we settled on an amazing idea! Creating an app to help students meet up to give out their meal swipes. A way to be sustainable but also meet new students!

Our main challenge was understanding how we should build our web app. We initially created an application and ran it on our local server on a laptop. However, with the sponsor of CruzHacks, we discovered Vercel, an easy way to host our web app to launch on various devices!

We are proud of learning a new tool today! Today was our first experience using Vercel and found the experience very easy and user-friendly. It was our first time as a group creating a web app that could be hosted on various devices, not only on a computer, so using Vercel was an interesting experience and a great opportunity that only CruzHacks could bring to us.

Eventually, we would love to integrate the GET Mobile app database into our application. This would ensure an authentic and live feed for SlugPoints and make sure students can track their points in a safe, but fun way!