(Meal) Block Chain

Inspiration

• Freshmen spend all their time eating on campus as they struggle to finish their mandatory meal blocks
• Upperclassmen buy food on campus
• Sometimes some people just want to eat other things
• Blocks are a win-win solution for all to have convenient on-campus meals
• Reduces wastage of meals

What it does

• Matches students who have extra blocks and those who are craving one
• Discover people selling blocks at certain timeslots
• Find people who are selling blocks at a certain time
• Match buyers and sellers fairly, quickly and easily
• Buyers/Sellers can check their order status
• Cancel an order at any time

How we built it

• Interfaces over Facebook Messenger API
• Botkit Framework for handling message queues
• MongoDB for persistence of orders
• Node.js web-server to glue everything together

Challenges we ran into

• Input validation
• Timestamp problems

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• It actually works, pretty well actually
• It will continue to work after today

What we learned

• The world needs a better bot framework (we might just go build one)

What's next for (Meal) Block Chain

• Acquire 100 unique users
• Sell advertising space to raise money for charitable causes
• Improve the overall enjoyment of on-campus food

Built With

• facebook-chat
• mongodb
• node.js