Swipe Me In

Donating to charity by giving and buying meal swipes

Comment

Inspiration

Many underclassmen on meal plan cannot finish their swipes by the end of the year, while upperclassmen off-meal plan cannot afford to eat off campus or have time to cook. Swipe Me In incentivizes people to donate and buy swipes by donating the money from each transaction to Second Harvest FoodBank.

What it does

A user can register to be a Feeder (giving swipes) or Eater (buying swipes). Each meal by default costs $5, which the Eater will pay for by depositing money into their account. To begin, the Feeder shares a meal onto our platform, specifying their location and time duration. Then, an Eater will claim the meal. After they meet up outside the dining place, the Feeder will swipe the Eater in and confirm the meal swipe on their account. This triggers a payment confirmation on the Eater’s account, deducting and donating $5 to the charity food bank.

How we built it

Swipe Me In consists of two parts. First, we built the front-end with Bootstrap and optimized it for mobile use. Then, we wrote an App class with Python that has functions that are called in the HTML file.

Challenges we ran into

  • Ran into too many bugs during deployment.
  • This is our first time building a web application and coding a website with Bootstrap.
  • Integrating the Stripe API was difficult for financial transactions, so the final implementation does not have a fully developed deposit/payment functions.
  • Keeping track of our data with Postgres was challenging.
  • Lack of sleep and fatigue from driving for 8 hours.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • An interactive component that involves more than one user
  • An efficient algorithm that differentiates between claimed/unclaimed meals and feeder/eater ID
  • Collaboration between team members

What we learned

  • The user flow created in the very beginning was the backbone of our project.
  • Establishing naming conventions can save a lot of time.
  • Deployment is extremely difficult.
  • YouTube and StackOverflow are our best friends and teachers.

What's next for Swipe Me In

  • Deploying it on Google Engine or Heroku
  • Create a functional and secure transaction platform
  • Integrate this platform a part of Brown’s GET portal, where students deposit money into their student ID account for meal services/laundry
  • Stylize the user interface like our high-fidelity prototypes
  • Add a messaging platform
Share this project:

Updates