SpoiledAlert

Inspiration

Last summer, one of our group members volunteered at the Greater Vancouver Food Bank as a way to spend their time contributing back to their community. One of the volunteer roles offered was sorting fresh food, where volunteers had to determine whether donated food was still fresh or had spoiled.

This inspired the idea behind SpoiledAlert. We wanted to explore whether technology could make it easier for someone to determine the freshness of food at home. Instead of immediately throwing away a fruit because it looks unusual, SpoiledAlert gives users another way to evaluate whether it is still safe to keep, should be eaten soon, or should be discarded.

What it does

The program asks for a fruit that the user inputs and asks several questions about the quality of the fruit. Based off the user's answers to the prompt, it will give them a recommendation to keep it or discard it.

How we built it

We used VS Code and C++ to build our program. We had to ask prompts the user had to put in and then that information would be stored as an integer variable. At the end, it would add all the number variables together and it would output an answer that would be determined based off of the inputs we gave it. The program uses if statements and while loops and lots of variable storing.

Challenges we ran into

Originally, we wanted to have the user upload images for our website AI to scan and determine the freshness of the fruit. However, we couldn't figure out how to include our AI into our VS code, so we scrapped that and made our program an interactive application instead. Another problem we ran into, was if the user put an answer other than a fruit, like "shoe". We set up restrictions afterwards to not let this happen.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting the VS Code to work as intended and applying the skills we learned from CMPT 130 into this project and the fact that our first hackathon project turned out pretty well.

What we learned

We learned how difficult website building was, since we didn't prepare well prior to starting our project, and we couldn't figure out how to transfer our code from VS Code and apply it to our website, if it was functional.

What's next for SpoiledAlert

We would research more on app development and use more advanced tools like an AI analyst which displays the nutritional facts of the fruit and the price of the fruit to display how much money would be wasted or donated if donatable. Also further develop the scaling system to become more specific while still trying to keep it easy and simple to use.

Built With

• c++
• vs-code