Submission for YHack Spring 2022 Project submission for YHACK Spring 2022, in collaboration with Chenling Huang and Lin Jing Liu.
As college students who regularly consume our meals in dining halls, we noticed how much food is wasted every day, both during the preparation and consumption phases. With our university's emphasis on sustainability and environmental protection, we felt impelled to decrease this waste, as there are many people around the world who don't have proper access to food. This program addresses this issue and increases awareness so that more users can become more conscious of whether they are wasting food on a daily basis and make improvements from there.
This program serves as a tracker tool that allows the user to input their food waste level every day, and provides a statistic summary of the food waste level based on user input. Then, over time, the user can track their food waste level and reflect upon that.
This program was built using Java, with interactive features that facilitate user input.
Through this process, we ran into a lot of challenges when building of the GUI, which is not the strongest feature of Java as a programming language. Therefore, we tried to make the GUI more presentable and appealing for user interactions. In addition, due to the time constraints of this Hackathon, we did not try to connect the program to a database. Instead, we worked on storing the user data into a file on the user's local disk.
We are proud of the work that we have done to address food waste using software and daily habits. The main point of this program is to stress that food waste is solved not through a single day's work, but rather incrementally over time.
Through this time-limited Hackathon, we encountered numerous challenges during the coding process which pushed us to think outside of the box to find quality solutions. Due to time constraints, we could not include every feature we wanted, so we also learned about priotizing effectively.
In the future, we hope to turn this project into an app with more sophisticated graphics and connection to a database, which will allow the user to log into their account and visualize their waste patterns in greater detail.