Description as a Tweet:

Want to have fast and easy on-the-go access to our dining hall food? Want to earn some quick money while being a broke college student? Check out MinuteMeals, a place where you can order food from any campus dining locatioand have it delivered by other students!

Inspiration:

As students, we are always under time constraints. Whether we are studying or attending back-to-back classes we wanted to find a way for students to be able to access the dining resources that UMass provides to the fullest. Sometimes 15 minutes between classes isn't even enough time to go through the Grab n' Go lines. We built this to provide an easy way to connect students for delivering food to each other when they are extremely pressed for time, also giving them the opportunity to make some extra money.

What it does:

Our project is a student-to-student food delivery service that is quick, efficient, and low-cost. It will connect students that are looking for quick and easy work with students that are in need of a quick meal delivery before their next class.

How we built it:

We brainstormed a lot of ideas, deciding to focus on pain points that affected the UMass Student body - college students like us. We came up with several ideas but decided to go with MinuteMeals! On the first night, we chose Android Studio as the IDE and Dart as our programming language, Flutter as our codebase, and Firebase as our backend cloud storage. We came up with an application design, using Miro and Notion to organize the team. Most of us spent the first half of the second day learning Dart and Flutter. The rest of the time we tackled individual pages of the application and integrated them with each other. We set up a backend system for saving login information on the cloud and other important backend operations. We reached out to UMass Dining, receiving a welcoming response, and we are excited to pursue this project to completion and beyond.

Technologies we used:

  • Misc

Challenges we ran into:

With the entire team being sophomores and having very to little no experience with App Development, it was difficult on getting started because there was a lot of catch-up. It was also difficult to come up with a particular issue on our campus that we wanted to solve and were passionate about. As a team we also never worked together before, therefore it was hard at first to coordinate what to do. Because everyone has a different skillset and understanding who could do what was definitely a challenge.

Accomplishments we're proud of:

“Dedication is belief transitioned into action which is transformed into change.”

- Byron Pulsifer

We are extremely proud of each and everyone’s dedication and motivation towards the project. Coming up with just the ambition of getting an experience, we are elated to see how even with no experience, we actually created a working solution for a real-life problem.

What we've learned:

Most of us had not worked with App Development before so we learned how to use Firebase and Flutter. We also learned how to work in a team environment - creating a workflow, organizing tasks, and staying positive and on track. We learned about the importance of networking and the amount of value people from different walks of life can provide. We turned to friends for help (the logo), and we supported each other through the two nights.

What's next:

Being extremely proud of our first prototype of the app, we're going to be focusing on enhancing the current front-end design and integrating the different existing components more closely with each other to make a product ready to launch. We have been in contact with UMass Dining already and plan on pursuing a dialogue regarding the integration of the UCard Debit and Meal Plan systems into our application. We have a long road ahead of us but we are excited to create something scalable that will improve our lives and those around us.

Built with:

During the course of our work, we used GitHub for code collaboration, Miro and Notion for project planning and app flow & design, Android Studio as the IDE, Flutter as the Software Development Kit, and Dart as the main programming language.

Prizes we're going for:

  • Best Software Hack
  • Best Venture Pitch
  • Best Beginner Software Hack
  • Best Mobile Hack
  • Best Use of Google Cloud

Prizes Won

Best Beginner Software Hack

Team Members

Rudra Gopal
Ethan Ritchie
Vidit shah
Philip Gessen
Jake Reardon
Michael Roncevich

Table Number

Table 13