WingScan

WingScan Logo

Award Categories

Best WiNG Award, Best UI/UX Award, People's Choice Award, Best Wing Award, Best Overall

Inspiration

Our project was inspired by our shared passion for ethical make-up and technology. We also wanted to create something that revolves around a passion predominantly embraced by women and gender minorities, blending beauty and technology in a way that represents our community.

What it does

WingScan can scan thousands of product barcodes from over 900 brands, informing users whether the products are ethically made or owned by underrepresented groups. Through our in-app barcode scanner, users are able to easily scan valid products while shopping to make better purchasing decisions! Furthermore, users are able to search from an alphabetically-sorted list consisting of a variety of brands. Many of these brands are lesser-known companies, which helps to promote supporting small businesses.

How we built it

We built our android mobile app through the use of Kotlin, XML, and Android Studio. We used a variety of online resources to support our project, such as the Barcode Lookup API, Apache POI API, Safe Args Gradle plugin, a data set with 900+ brands, and GitHub for version control.

Thanks to our amazing team, we made tremendous progress, in just a few hours, while also having fun throughout the process. Our time was spent brainstorming, prepping, building, testing, and refining our project in order to make sure it was ready to be presented.

Challenges we ran into

Our first challenge was figuring out an idea for a project that we were all passionate about making. We started with the idea of making a web application, which is something all of us have done in the past. While this idea seemed appealing to us because we all had prior experience with it, we quickly realized that it lacked the excitement we were looking for. The web app would have been the more straightforward choice, but we wanted to push ourselves beyond our comfort zone. As a result, we pivoted to developing a mobile app, excited to embrace the learning curve and gain valuable experience.

Additionally, we faced several technical challenges, primarily due to the learning curve and limited time to master the necessary technologies. One significant issue was smoothly integrating our data between the frontend and backend. Although we successfully parsed the data through our database, displaying it correctly on the UI proved to be difficult. To overcome this, we dedicated a lot of time to research and trial and error to find the best solution. Although we had these challenges, all of us were successful at building new skills and creating a project we are proud of with those skills.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of ourselves for trying something that none of us have ever explored before: mobile development. Not only did all of us explore a different side of our field, but we also learned new languages and technologies. Furthermore, we are proud that we were able to implement such a functioning app in such a short amount of time, given that none of us had prior experience. We were proud to achieve many core functionalities in our app such as barcode scanning, camera accessibility, data parsing and displaying, search filtering, and user-friendly UI elements.

What we learned

From a technical standpoint, we gained valuable experience in mobile app development, Kotlin, XML, Android Studio, data integration, and utilizing APIs and plug-ins. Additionally, we learned how to collaborate effectively in a fast-paced team environment, especially with limited time, as for many of us, this was our first hackathon. We also developed skills in task prioritization by effectively communicating and efficient version control, allowing us to make the most of our time and work efficiently.

What's next for WingScan

For WingScan's future, one of our main goals is to expand our dataset to include additional categories that users can benefit from, such as information about whether products are cruelty-free, sustainably sourced, or owned by women and gender minorities. Additionally, we could implement a map feature that shows a user the nearest stores that carry their scanned product so they can maximize shopping convience and efficiency. Eventually, we hope to deploy our app onto app stores as well as make it cross-platform to be available on iOS devices as well.