Inspiration
Our project was based on the present rising issues of sustainability. We have noticed the majority of campus events have excess food that is simply disposed, while there is still a problem related to Student Food Insecurity. After discussing the issues and figuring out the potential solutions, we decided to combine these ideas making them both benefitting each other.
What it does
Our famous UBC motto, “Tuum Est,” means “It's yours, and it's up to you.” And with TuumEats, we want you to know the food is yours, and the food is up to you. Our Website scrapes Instagram to find campus events with free and affordable food provided. By locating these events on our Website, the project aims to reduce food waste by encouraging more people to attend and consume the excess food, creating a more sustainable campus environment. As well as addressing the food insecurity among undergraduate students and reducing these numbers. The other goal of our platform is to spread awareness of various events to students from different faculties to allow students to socialize and connect.
How we built it
Our project was mainly built on Web Scraping data from Instagram. We chose this specific social media platform due to its high popularity among UBC students. Most UBC communities and associations, clubs, and groups post information about the upcoming events there the most. This was our reasoning for choosing the data source to scrape the data from. We have used Selenium and Beautiful Soup tools to log in and scrape the Instagram Feed, in particular, the post captions. This is data that is to be posted on the Website. Due to the nature of the Instagram feed, it shouldn't be updated frequently, so for now, the users cannot refresh the events themselves.
For scraping the data, we used Python and Selenium; for website building, we used Javascript, HTML, React, and CSS; for collaboration, we used the github platform.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into challenges while Web Scraping data from Instagram. The challenge was mainly related to accessing the relevant data from the Instagram Feed since the posts there change their order every time we update the page. It was also challenging to access the post's captions since Instagram itself is a photo-viewing-directed platform.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of our hard teamwork and our personal contribution to the project. But, most importantly, we are grateful to have an opportunity to learn and expand our knowledge in the areas we are interested.
What we learned
We have learned a lot about Web Scraping as well as Web Development. These two areas are new to all of out team members.
What's next for TuumEats
We are thinking of improving our filtering and formatting of data that is posted on the Website.
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