MenuMingle: Personalize Penn Stae Palate

Inspiration

As first year students, three of our peers had the issue of choosing what to eat due to dietary restrictions due to cultural. We knew that other students around the campus were having same issue so when we arrived to the Hackathon, we though that this would be a great project to take on. We also were inspired by MyPlate by the U.S. Government. We wanted to have a similar concept while helping students at the university.

What it does

Our project uses the menu cards of the buffets at all 5 of dining halls at Penn State, (North, East, Redifer, Warwick, and Pollock), and collects the meals being served that day for breakfast, lunch, dinner. It then takes information from the user, such as age, height, weight, constraints, average exercise time and calculates the approximate calorie intake and what meals the user can eat. It then gives a menu card for the user to have his meal planned out for the day.

How we built it

Challenges we ran into

We ran into hurdles at every step of our project. We were very eager from the start of the project. Once we learned about all the tools we can use, we first try to approach by using Taipy. We were all in our first year, and were currently learning Python, so we really wanted to create our solution with it. We were struggling to learn and implement it. Even with Paul's help, our group would often get stuck and we spent two hours realizing it wasn't worth the time for us to continue.

Another challenge we ran into was working as a team. For some of our team members, this was the first time outside of a school setting working on a team project. It was to divide up the work as we all were very confused on where to start. We originally split up to have two backend programmers, two frontend programmers, and had one floater. We quickly realized that we were wrong with this arrangement. This not only hindered our learning of the framework but also hindered our team working skills.

Finally, since we all are first years, we really struggled with time management during the event. At some points are backend was faster than the frontend and we were playing catch up. One thing we can say we got out of this hackathon was better time management skills.