Vegan Challenge

Wireframe for the Vegan Challenge app.
Button to start challenge. A toast pops up when you start it.
Day counter with check in button, it'll be this way for 30 days.

Inspiration

I've been attending meetings with the RIT Vegan club, and we were discussing the effects of Veganuary (Go vegan for all of January) and how it would be even more accessible to people as an app. I saw this as an issue that I could solve, so I decided to try tackling it at WiCHack this year!

What it does

Currently the app itself does not do much. It has a barebones UI and it stores some data in the phone with a counter for what day it is, which can be manually triggered for testing purposes, but will otherwise be triggered on a daily basis when the user checks in. We made a wireframe to represent where we're going with it, and a lot of research will need to be done to dig up good articles, foods, and drinks for every day of the thirty day challenge. We also decided to add a third page that will list a fun fact (did you know that cashews come from a fruit?), and then a nutritional fact for the consumer end of the food safety spectrum, like knowing how to tell if something is ripe or rotten, how long you can leave certain vegan foods out before you need to throw it away, and much more to assist new vegans in staying safe and healthy!

How we built it

We started by making a wireframe of ideas and what we wanted the UI to look at, and then we decided on using Kotlin in Android studio for making the application. We decided on this because making an Android app was completely new to us and we wanted to learn something new, as well as Kotlin not being super familiar to us and we wanted some more exposure to it.

Challenges we ran into

As we mentioned, it was our first time working in Android studio and we did not have a ton of Kotlin experience, so there were tons of bugs to figure out and tutorials to seek out, so we did not end up getting as much of the project done as we would have liked to.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We got SharedPreferences set up and functioning to store data in the phone and retrieve it between sessions, which is really important to keep track of what day the user is on! Also the wireframe is well made and I feel we have a great path forwards once we work out the rest of the kinks in the UI.

What we learned

Working with Kotlin in Android Studio was a great learning experience, and I feel much more confident in my ability to say to myself, "that's a good app idea, and I can make it!"

What's next for Vegan Challenge

We will need to finish the UI, gather up the aforementioned research, do testing with a group of friends that would be interested in the concept, fix the errors, and then publish to the android app store! If all of that goes well, then we will also try to port it over to iOS.