Student Hunger Smart Assistant

Given a start destination and end destination, our website presents the user with restaurants that are en-route from point A to point B. Displays the name, address, and rating of the businesses.

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Inspiration

We were inspired after thinking about common problems that not only college students go through, but everyone goes through. Thinking of other projects like ZotFinder and AntAlmanac, we created our project keeping UCI students in mind, but it honestly can be used by anyone! There are a lot of food places around, but we often walk around campus and the surrounding area not really knowing what to eat. With our project, we wanted to make something that makes it easier to list nearby food places when you're traveling from point A to point B.

What it does

Using our website, the user can input two addresses/locations (start/end). The user can then choose different price ranges, radius (how far you're willing to walk away from the route), and any keywords (boba, pizza, cultural cuisine, etc). Once the user submits their inputs, the website will present all the nearby food places following the filters and relevant places, making it both time and cost efficient!

How we built it

We built our project using a Python backend and JavaScript/HTML/CSS frontend. With backend, we used the Yelp and Google Maps API so that it'll suggest the best route for the given addresses and present all the nearby locations within the radius. For frontend, we built the interface using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. To connect both frontend and backend, we used fastAPI to send data back and forth.

Challenges we ran into

When working with the backend, we were really struggling on trying to find nearby places along the given route between two points. We couldn't get our midpoint correct, so the radius to find nearby places was inaccurate. After a lot of struggling and lurking through StackOverflow, we finally figured the midpoint out and our json outputs were working!

As for frontend, we mainly struggling with displaying our data correctly. We connected the frontend and backend, but it was hard to finish everything separately since they depended on each other, and it's hard to see the final product without both frontend and backend being complete and ready.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It honestly felt euphoric when we finally got our backend and frontend to connect and work together. Most of our code on both sides (front/backend) felt almost done but definitely not complete. We knew that even though we had already spent hours, we still had so much to do before finalizing our project. Being able to see frontend and backend work together was a good sign that we were moving along, but it's satisfying to think about how far we came and everything we learned in just half a day!

What we learned

Before ZotHacks, we had little to no experience with both frontend and backend. None of us knew how to use JavaScript, and we all struggled to start our project off with whatever we knew. However, with lots of help from our mentors and attending workshops, it's rewarding to say that we'll be able to submit our project knowing a bit more about frontend and backend development using JS, HTML, and CSS!

What's next for Student Hunger Smart Assistant

We would like to improve the user experience and aesthetics with the web app through CSS along with making the address input simpler for the user.

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