SCU Dining Points Exchange

Welcome page
Sign Up page
Fulfill Requests page

Inspiration

It’s noon - you just got out of your arduous Data Structure & Algorithms class, and you’re exhausted and starving. You crawl towards Benson, your ID card in hand, desperate for a meal…

Oh no! You’re out of Dining Points. Whatever will you do now? Your next class is at 1pm, and it’s one you definitely can’t skip. Who knows what your professor would do if you skipped the mandatory Database Systems lecture the day before finals?

This is a daily struggle of most SCU students - both those who live on-campus and those who commute alike. As poor, broke college students, we seldom lack the funds to provide ourselves with the necessary nutrients to power our constantly working brains. Not to mention, some of us are too proud or reserved to ask for help - whether because of personal or cultural reasons.

But we, this Hack for Humanity team, have a solution! Introducing our brand new webapp - SCU Dining Points Exchange - we offer an application in which students can offer to help each other purchase food with their extra Dining Points.

Food is important, and we believe that everyone should be able to eat when they need to on-campus, no matter the circumstance. #NeverLetABroncoGoHungry!

Technologies

We used an abundance of web development tools for our project. Besides the obvious HTML and CSS for the frontend, we also used JavaScript (specifically SQLite) for our backend. Feel free to check out our code in our Glitch.com repository below!

Check out our code here!

https://glitch.com/edit/#!/scu-dining-points-exchange

Challenges

Unfortunately, we faced many challenges while working on this project. The first and most prominent issue was the inability to apply any Google Cloud services to our project. For reasons unknown to us, the school has disabled the SCU Organization (and thus all SCU students) from using our SCU emails for these services, including for SCU login authorization and for Firebase API. As such, we had to stick to a standard user account creation page and check for emails ending in “@scu.edu” upon registration.

This made up the majority of our issues with the backend, and by the time we decided to switch from using Firebase to SQLite for our database, we had run out of time at this hackathon.

Future Plans

Despite our many setbacks, we, as a team, still plan on completing this project. We believe that this website will be very useful and is of interest to many current SCU students, as seen in the following Google poll form that we sent out to the student population: https://forms.gle/r1fg3WP59QGst1Bv7

We had also attempted to work on a research paper for this hackathon, but due to our previously mentioned challenges and the limited time we had left, we were unable to complete it. However, we believe that this research would be both useful in our project itself and beneficial to us personally as a research learning experience, and so we plan on completing this at a later date, too. This paper would have been about implementing a priority queue to determine the order in which the requests for food/drinks populate our database (as a table). The priority queue would be based on what time users request their food to be ready.

Additionally, we plan on adding more features besides just requesting and fulfilling food/drink orders for our web app users in the future. We plan to also display confirmed requests and their pending statuses. And, when someone has fulfilled their accepted requests, we want them to be able to upload a picture of the QR code for pickup to confirm the request has been fulfilled. We also want to later implement a timer for requests that haven’t been fulfilled by Benson’s closing hours or have been accepted but not fulfilled within a requester’s requested time limit (which we will automatically set as 30 minutes if not specified).

Furthermore, we realize that our current method of user account creation is neither efficient nor secure. A fake “@scu.edu” could be used during registration. To address this issue, we plan on adding SCU email verification to counter this later.

Finally, as most students on-campus are usually on-the-go, we would like our webapp to eventually be mobile friendly. We also plan to eventually make mobile app versions of our project for both iOS and Android devices.

The Team

Marissa Kuo, Computer Science & Engineering, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Math Minor, 2025
Hannah Dinh, Undeclared, 2026
Joanne Chang, Computer Science & Engineering, 2023
Tanvi Pandey, Computer Science & Engineering, 2023