Up for Grabs

This is the basic flow of our app.
NAME TAG!
TEAM PIC!

Inspiration

As freshmen, we are desperately in need of friends, or companions. Another thing that most of us did not experience in high school is the feeling of constantly being broke for food. Those are both pretty serious issues for us. Therefore, we came up with the idea of "Up for Grab," an app for lonely individuals to avoid eating alone and save money at the same time.

What it does

Suppose UserA made extra food he wants to share with others. He posts information about it (including a picture, a description, how many servings, time, if it’s charged and etc. ) on Up for Grabs to people nearby. UserB and UserC both see the post and want the food. They can both send requests to go, however, UserA can decide whether to decline or accept their requests based on their profiles.

How we built it

We had a very long group discussion at the very beginning of Dubhacks. We brainstormed everyone’s problems and interests, and decided to try to solve a common problem for college freshmen: being broke and lonely. We decided to build an app in Java with SQL. The IDE we used is Netbeans, we also, of course, used Github.

Challenges we ran into

Since we are all inexperienced freshmen, none of us have ever built any apps. At first, we could not figure out how to work on the same project at the same time. We wasted a lot of time on that. Also, most of us have never used Netbeans before, it took a while for us to get comfortable with it. Other challenges we ran into includes exhaustion and unfamiliarity among teammates.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We stayed in a room with three other teams, and we are definitely the newbies in the room. We were intimidate. But after a few hours, people started giving up. Even though we still are not sure if our program will run successfully at the end, we never gave up. We tried our best and created something we actually wanted to build, and we actually like what we are building!

What we learned

Time management is one of the deciding factors when it comes to teamwork. Because of lack of experience, we wasted a lot of time trying to work with each other and arguing about duties in the first half of DubHacks. We saw a significant increase in our efficiency as a team in the second half. We learned how to work with others. Also, of course, we learned that building something new can be really frustrating and doesn’t always work out the way you want it to. But things tend to work out (hopefully).

What's next for Up for Grabs

We had a few ideas that we wanted to try out but never got the time to. Here are a few of them:

Keyword Search/ Machine Learning With the help of API and some knowledge about Machine Learning, we want the app to pick up descriptions for the images and label the images by it self.
Favorite Chief/ Comment or rate posts After using this app for a while, people will get familiar with each other and therefore there might be some “community chiefs.” People should be able to follow the chiefs they like and see what they’ve been doing.
Private Chats/ Group Chats/ Private Posts As stated in the last point, after people get familiar with each other, people need a platform to communicate in a more efficient way.
Online Connection to Banks After the app gains popularity, paying in cash might be a pain. Some sort of online payment method should be linked to it.
Recipes for Popular Dishes
Safety problem caused by real-time location