LeftOvers

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About the team

A friendship bonded from high school leads us to our first ever Hackathon!🎉 The team consists of first-year and second-year software engineering students in Concordia University.🎓

Inspiration

From chit chatting in between classes to late-night Discord calls🌙, common question that always strikes us is:

"I don't know what to eat for dinner tonight"🤔

From this point on, we would usually let the ingredients in our fridge rot and eventually go to waste. We would either make the food go to waste or break our banks on food delivery.💸 As a group of students united by our shared concern for climate change, we acknowledge the potential environmental impact of generating greenhouse gases during the decomposition of mass food waste.

In our commitment to contribute to climate change mitigation while maintaining budget-conscious practices, we conceived the idea of developing a program. This initiative aims to assist in repurposing leftover food into nutritious meals, thereby simultaneously addressing both sustainability and economic considerations.

What it does

It cooks for you!

Not really. But it gives you an idea for you to cook! 🍳 Given the user input of ingredients sitting in their fridge, AI Chatbot will search in its database for available recipes using the given ingredients. Then, it will provide the user with 5 top recipes with calories, time to cook, and difficulty. To a mouth watering factor, Unsplash will provide a preview of the plate. 🍽️

How we built it

We brainstormed A LOT. Then divided the big project into small subtasks to assign to every members. Using powerful APIs such as GPT and Unsplash, we link those APIs to Unity objects as necessary. Whenever a team member was having a difficulty in learning or implementing, other members would help each other out with appropriate knowledge to guide them through. Polishing UI/UX was a big issue. (e.g. Making more motions during transition, creating faster loadups, etc.)

Challenges we ran into

Perfectionism

As all members prefer quality over quantity, we would spend an unnecessary amount of time into very small details trying to make it look perfect. As junior developers ourselves, the entire process consisted of simultaneous self-lectures and immediate integrations. With our attention to details, we reckon that better time management could have been useful.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We made it work!👏

Although better time management was needed, our planning, prioritization, and dedication is commendable. Given a relatively short deadline and a handful of stress, we are proud to have the team cooperating together to reach our end product.

What we learned

We got well adversed in using Unity Engine, C#, and understanding the basic concepts of UI/UX and APIs. We gained valuable insights into effective teamwork during our collaborative coding project, leveraging platforms such as GitHub and Unsplash. Additionally, we honed our project planning skills, enhancing our overall ability to work cohesively as a team.

What's next for LeftOvers

From a business perspective, there are many profit-achieving opportunities. Some ideas we brainstormed consisted of a monthly subscription that would provide users with unlimited searches per day, given that we put a limit to the free version of the application. Moreover, we can persuade more users to pay the subscription if we give users recipe videos created by our “company” alongside the step-by-step instructions that we provide.

In terms of enhancing performance, our goal is to augment the program's user interactivity and foster extensive feedback integration. Proposed features include options for allergies and halal preferences, the capability to upvote or downvote recipes, and the implementation of data storage for refining recipe recommendations.🚀