FoodForThought

Food For Thought

Inspiration

Charities are tasked with distributing several food sources and providing to the impoverished. However, not everyone has the ability to donate food through charities or similar organizations even though they have excess food. Thus, tons of food are wasted around the world due to the lack of proper donation. This is where Food For Thought Comes in.

What it does

Food For Thought is a web application that helps provide to those in local communities, extending to those across the globe. This app's purpose is to make food donation significantly easier by connecting people in various communities. People have the ability to create an account and be able to list extra food they may have at any given time on a public map of their surrounding area. Charities and those less privileged can also see the listed food and go to pick-up points to get the food.

How we built it

We started on our project by first brainstorming as a group for ideas, and we came up with about four to five of them, finally narrowing it down to Food For Thought. In order to build this application, we explored various programming languages such as c#, python, and dart before finalizing with React. We designated roles and split up tasks amongst ourselves so that we could develop several parts of the application at once. Victor handled creating React pages and linking them across each other, Rohit and Rohan worked together on the styling the User Interface and polishing, and Adhi worked on connecting the database to the application in addition to creating functions that performed the operations on the database. We constantly showed each other our code and progress so we could review and provide feedback amongst ourselves.

Challenges we ran into

Our team decided on building our application using React, however we didn't know how to exactly use it, so we started developing with Dart. After working with Dart for some time, we found it hard to implement some parts of the app, so we switched back to React, learning along the way. Another challenge we ran into was finding and figuring out how to utilize a database in the beginning of our development, but we learned how to work with AWS.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One accomplishment we’re proud of is that our app successfully utilizes AWS DynamoDB and the app has a fully functional User Interface that not only achieves our app’s purpose but also incorporates a unique aesthetic and colorway.

What we learned

We all learned how to work with Javascript, CSS, and HTML. Since we wanted to incorporate Google Maps into our application, we also learned how to utilize Google Cloud. Another thing we learned was how to configure our code to send data from the app to AWS’s DynamoDB.

What's next for Food For Thought

One thing that we want to implement for Food For Thought is background checks for food donors, because it’s vital that people who donate food need to be reliable and trustworthy. We also want to improve how Food For Thought displays information to customers, specifically in a more intuitive fashion. In addition to this, we also want to forward our application by marketing it and making the app more personalizable for users. All of these additions and improvements would make sure the app isn’t hard to use and also conveys its true purpose.