Food Pantry Finder

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  Code for owner requesting new items

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  Code for pinpointing location

Inspiration

When we were doing research for the UN Sustainable goals, we were shocked to learn that the Bay Area’s food insecurity rates were so high, despite its large economy and worldwide renown. We wanted to create an app to effeciantly and effectively help people through this issue.

What it does

The app will ask the user for their location (basically their address). Using a map system the app will find food pantries near them, or in their cities. When a user clicks on a certain food pantry, the app will show them information like its open hours and the items the pantry needs. Based on that, the user can decide for themselves which pantry they will visit and what foods they want to buy. The owner of a patnry can create a login for themselves and edit the list of items that people can donate to their pantries.

How we built it

First, we created a homepage that would redirect us to several different cities. We indexed all the food banks in the cities, and in theory, when you click on the pantry name, it would direct you to a list of items the pantry needs. However, we only had enough time to do it for Milpitas Food Pantry, so that is what we will use in the demo.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges that we ran into were that the login page made it difficult to index the different items that the owners of the pantry were requesting.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re really proud of our login page because it took us a lot of debugging and problem solving, but we eventually used our past knowledge about MIT app inventor and the help of a tech mentor to make it fully usable in our demo.

What we learned

We learned that time management is important, and that coders should always check what an item does before blindly using it in their code because it looks similar enough to what they are looking for.

What's next for Food Pantry Finder

If given more time, we would actually connect the pantry login page to the availability of the editing on each page of the items requested, but we did not. We would also make the schedule of the pantry editable for the owners. If we have more time, we might be looking to launch this with the support of more advanced web designers and make it accessible for the public to run.

Built With

• mit-app-inventor