Description:

This is an app for IOS and Android that utilizes the number one college dining service and brings it to a new level. By allowing delivery of grab and go food on campus, our app does three things. It adds high paying jobs to campus, gives UMass dining another step up, and allows students to get food delivered for cheaper when compared to Domino’s or Insomnia Cookies.

Inspiration:

We are a group of freshman CS majors from UMass Amherst with little to no app building skills. The majority of us are members of the Commonwealth Honors College, while with it’s many perks lacks a dining common within a 10 minute walk. We saw an issue, then hypothesized and spent a night full of debate into the application of this app (typical nerd forest talk). Through discussion we realized that with the correct implementation, we can benefit a lot of niches on campus and make the most successful student run business UMass has ever had.

What it does:

Our project allows a user to select a dining hall, then select their order from grab and go from the dining hall. This is then submitted and is sent to a delivery version of the app used by students at UMass who are our deliverers. The deliverers location is updated and sent to the customers app so the customer can get real time tracking of their food.

How we built it:

One out of the four of us has used some type of app builder before. This lead us into Unity even though this is one of the most challenging possible App Engines we could have chosen for our specific app. We built a wireframe using Framer X, then used those attributes to put them into Unity. Using plugins for Unity, we included location services and integration with a server that sends information between the client and deliverer.

Challenges we ran into:

Having literally no experience with app design, the entire project was one of the most challenging things we have ever overcome. The wireframe started us out on a good track, but once we were ready to start using Unity we hit a brick wall. This had us spend all of saturday morning watching tutorials and learning app design as a group. Once we concluded what we thought would be the hardest part of the project, we realized that a server to send data between client and deliverer was needed. After countless mentor meetings and attempting to use 5 different cloud servers, we gave up. We figured that an app prototype is more important then server implementation. We’re coders though. We keep going if we don’t know the answer. After hours of troubleshooting and learning new coding languages, we successfully passed data over our server. From here we spent Saturday night into Sunday morning polishing our first ever app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of:

We are proud of everything that we overcame this past weekend. There were so many times of utter defeat with no future insight for “Hungry?”. Our ability to stick together as a team and overcome these obstacles by learning together and growing as young coders is what we feel was the biggest accomplishment of this weekend.

What we learned:

Everything we learned this weekend (literally had no idea how to do these before): Python, HTTP Post requests, Unity building, Xcode/Swift, Android SDK, optimizing attention with energy drinks, and Terminal commands.

What's next:

This is not just a hack, this is a business. We want to bring this to the innovation challenge and create a company at UMass that benefits so many parts of our diverse community. We want to further our knowledge of app development and further improve the physical aesthetics and logic behind the app. In addition we want to invite some Isenberg business majors to use their skill set in implementing our app and idea as a true business. HackUMass was our start, and the end is nowhere in sight with the amount of innovation possible.

Built with:

This App was built using Unity/C#, Photoshop/Framer X, Python/HTTP Post and Get requests, and lastly Xcode/Android App Developer.

Prizes we're going for:

$100 Amazon Gift Cards

Hustle Award

Social Entrepreneurship Award

Grand Prize

Blu R2 Plus Smartphones

Team Members

Eli Nottonson, Sam Wallace, Renos Zabounidis, Matteo Baeyens
View on Github