Wolfie Butler

Inspiration

Students easily feel overwhelmed with the variety of food across dining halls. The "Freshman 15" is a popular term referring to the belief that students gain 15 pounds during their first year of college. Although this figure is not representative of every student, college life can bring changes in routines, food choices, and eating habits. Furthermore, the current menu and nutrient calculation metrics on Nutrislice is still lacking in variety and personalization.

What it does

Our platform help students explore available dishes, estimate their daily energy needs and track their caloric intake, and build meals around personalized nutritional goals and dietary preferences. Users can plan their meal throughout the day, then track and monitor macronutrients (calories, carbohydrates, protein, fat, fiber).

How we built it

Using manual input like age, height, weight, sex, and activity level, and used equations like the Mifflin–St Jeor equation to estimate metabolic rates and daily energy needs. By integrating APIs from Nutrislice, Gemini, Photon, we managed to create an up-to-date menu and planner combined with on-web support by our AI-powered assistant, equipped with voice chat for accessibility.

Challenges we ran into

Connecting multiple services together was one of our biggest challenges. Our AI-powered chat support was the most meticulous part of this entire operation. Gemini was in charge of the on-web assistant, while also having a secondary chat pathway through iMessage from Photon. The most difficult task was to allow all three to connect to the same chat logs, and then to pull information from said chat log into changing profile settings and metrics (i.e. "Change my weight from 180lbs to 150lbs" -> Changes profile weight to 150lbs)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team entirely consists entirely of first-year college students, with little to no experience towards coding (let alone a hackathon or deploying a functioning website). Across these 36 hours of coding, we have successfully created a working website, integrated external APIs, connecting multiple interaction modes (which were all "firsts" for all of us). Furthermore, we also learned more about the process behind making a good UI/UX, balancing aesthetics with functionality.

What we learned

This was a huge learning opportunity to get to understand the concepts and process and hardships that go into making every websites. We learned more about utilizing AI to write code, about the process of Frontend and Backend development, about cloud databases, deployment, APIs, and AI-assisted coding. Especially, combining all of these elements into a single framework is the most arduous task of all.

What's next for Wolfie Butler

In the future, we plan to seamlessly connect Wolfie Butler as an extension to Nutrislice, instead of being two separate experiences. Wolfie Butler will operate directly within the menu-browsing experience.