WoMenu

A curated menu for your period.

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Inspiration

Several of us, as well as our friends, have had... painful period experiences, to put it lightly. Many of us have tried different strategies to cope, a common one being eating specific foods. After all, some foods are better for relieving period symptoms than others. However, we've found that USC's dining hall menus, while informative, are often unclear and cramped (pun intended). Many women also don't know what foods are actually good for their periods! We decided that AthenaHacks was the perfect opportunity to try and solve this problem. Although this is only our first hackathon, we want to start ambitiously. Meet WoMenu: a curated menu for your period!

What it does

WoMenu takes the basic USC dining hall menu and allows you to filter foods into two categories: something that's good (or neutral) to eat during your period and something that's bad to eat during your period. This is based on factors such as omega-3 content and if it contains essential nutrients like iron and protein. WoMenu also categorizes by meal time and dining hall for convenience!

How we built it

We built WoMenu by creating a framework of what we wanted an app version of our product to look like in Figma and using React as well as Chakra UI to create our site. We scraped the USC dining hall website for the list of menu items using Beautiful Soup, then stored that information into Firebase, and tagged what foods should be marked as good for your period or bad for your period using Google Gemini.

Challenges we ran into

This was our first hackathon, and we all had varying levels of experience creating websites, ranging from absolutely nothing to slightly more than nothing. Kyra had to relearn Figma, Violet drew numerous pieces of art for the site, and Phoebe dived deep into the world of web development for the first time, and came back up nearly drowned. We tried to use Taipy at first, but quickly realized that it was going to take more time than we had to get used to it. This was for sure one hell of a first hackathon.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Against all odds, we submitted something that's not even half-bad, if we do say so ourselves! Under a lot of stress, frustration, and confusion (some more than others... sorry, Phoebe), we managed to create a project that we are proud of! We also made it both creative and realistically helpful in a short period (this time, no pun intended). Especially as first-timers, we accomplished a lot!

What we learned

We were able to refresh our HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Python knowledge, as well as learn to use Figma, Beautiful Soup, Firebase, and React! We also learned how to be mindful of scope and let go of what we couldn't realistically keep. Most importantly, we learned not to give up, even when you really, really want to sometimes. Third- no, fourth- erm, fifth time's the charm!

What's next for WoMenu

In our original concept, we'd intended further features such as filtering by allergies or for vegetarians/vegans. We also want to implement a search function, as well as expand WoMenu to schools other than USC. We'd also like to improve the current AI to more accurately answer what is best for periods. These had to be cut for scope during the hackathon, but they're next on the to-do list!

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