Wack and Pack

Everyone has things in their house that they don't use or want anymore. Instead of throwing it away or having it collect dust in your house, why not donate it instead?

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Inspiration

Everyone has things in the house that is no longer used or wanted. One of the most common being clothes. Instead of throwing away these things or letting them collect dust, they could be donated to organizations for people that would be able to use these items instead, however, it can be difficult to find these places. Our platform is designed to make donating easier and to hopefully encourage more people to help the environment and decrease the amount of landfill and wasted products.

What it does

Depending on the objects users want to donate, the website will recommend places near them that accept those items. Currently, our website accounts for donations of clothes, appliances or technology, books, and food. Our website will also allow the user to collect points that can be exchanged for fun prizes in the future.

How we built it

We built the website by first creating the drafts on figma. We then took the drafts created to design our website page using Angular. Our website was made live using Domain.com, which is connected to the Google Cloud VM instance. All of our back-end was coded in Java where we also utilized Json files to store data.

Challenges we ran into

Some of the challenges we ran into happened because we have a pretty diverse background in terms of coding skills and strengths, and we all had a lot to learn in order to implement the components of the project. However, at the same time, this allowed us to incorporate many ideas into the final product.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the design of the website, as well as being able to attach a domain to the Google cloud servers. The back-end of our code contains a lot of impressive coding designs and implementations as well. We also implemented a Google API to be able to get the locations of donation cetners.

What we learned

We each learned different things while making the website, especially the process of mapping out the designs, building the website off the design, and connecting it with the backend. We also learned how to use APIs and the process needed to make a live webpage.

What's next for Wack and Pack

For the rewards system, we don't actually have any rewards to give out. To provide an incentive, we would incorporate a system where people can cash in their points for rewards like coupons or gift cards. We also plan to create more categories for people to donate different things on, such as adding a toys donation section.

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