Struggle & Scran

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Our project is called Struggle & Scran, a meal website aimed at students. The website takes an input of ingredients available, either as a photo or a typed input, as well as the time that you have available and your dietary preferences. The website then delivers an AI-generated recipe in a deadpan tone, which the user can accept or generate a new recipe. Once a recipe has been accepted, the website asks if the user has all the ingredients needed (as some generated recipes may need a few more ingredients than the user has inputted). If no, they will be taken to a new ‘shopping list’ window, where they can search for items in a supermarket price comparison tool, to find the prices of the product at major supermarkets. We also included accessibility features, such as a light/dark mode toggle and a read aloud feature.

Our project was inspired by our own experiences of concocting meals from whatever ingredients we have available. We also recognised the use of a price comparison page for groceries, so that all the information is available on one page rather than searching around for the needed information.

Every stage of this project was a learning experience. As first-time hackers, our first challenge was getting set up on GitHub (learning push & pull as well as creating branches and merging), as it is a technology some of us were not familiar with. Once we had conquered that, we enjoyed learning to use the Gemini API through Google AI Studio and working out how to integrate all the different elements into one page. We had our steepest learning when trying to figure out API keys, and we were grateful for the support of the volunteers and the workshops.