Description as a Tweet:

No Belly Left Behind enables residents of the Greater Seattle Area to quickly locate nearby COVID emergency food and meals. Our Android application leverages a real-time information database to provide users with important information regarding each emergency food location.

Inspiration:

Due to the formidable COVID-19 disease, US unemployment rates have increased at an alarming rate. Even with the federal stimulus act in place, many are struggling to stay afloat. Although some have been fortunate enough to easily adjust to a quarantined/virtual lifestyle, many have found themselves asking questions like how they can afford their next meal, how they can provide food for their family, how will their children eat?

The Greater Seattle Area was the first known epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. Before long, everything shut down and quarantine began. And not long after that, with the economy in the slumps, people began to lose their jobs.

No Belly Left Behind’s mission is to make sure that no belly is left behind. To achieve this goal, we give people an easy way to find out where they can get emergency food and meals.

What it does:

Our Android application enables users to quickly locate nearby COVID emergency food and meals. When the app is first opened, the user can see their own location as well as surrounding map markers indicating places where emergency food is provided. The user can drag the map to move around as well as use the search bar to survey a different location. Our application also includes a filters button that allows the users to filter which food location markers to display. For example, some locations are catered towards the youth, while others are catered toward the general public. Users can also filter by distance and open hours. When a marker is clicked, additional information is displayed including information such as a website link, phone number, hours of operation, the address, target audience, and the agency hosting the site.

How we built it:

To build No Belly Left Behind, we used Android App Studio, the Google Maps SDK, and Google Firebase. The main file types we worked with are, Java, XML, JSON, and CSV. Our map feature is the main feature of our application and we leveraged the Google Maps SDK to display custom map markers based on our latitude/longitude data and the user’s current location. Because the type of data we are displaying can change over time, we decided to use a realtime database hosted by Google Firebase which allows us to store our data in the cloud. We got our data from Seattle’s public data set. This dataset can be found here: https://data.seattle.gov/Community/COVID-Emergency-Food-and-Meals-Seattle-and-King-Co/kkzf-ntnu

Technologies we used:

• Java

Challenges we ran into:

Since none of us had much experience with the technologies we were using, it took us a lot of time to get set up with Android App Studio and Firebase. We greatly underestimated how long it would take Android App Studio to load/run and we actually determined that one of our computers was ultimately too old to run the application because it would load forever so that team member had to go look for a faster laptop to borrow. We were also unfamiliar with some of the event-driven Java syntax so it took us some time to understand how everything flowed together.

Accomplishments we're proud of:

Going into this hackathon, two of us had never used Android App Studio before, one of us had never attended a hackathon before, and none of us had used any Google SDKs or cloud services before. Overall, we felt like total noobs. So now looking at how far we have come, we are proud of a lot of things. We are proud that we were able to create something that does something good for our community. We are proud that we were able to quickly learn how to use new technologies and put together a real mobile application that is useful and has a lot of potential. We are especially proud of the filtering aspect because we ran into the most trouble when it came to this feature, but we were able to work together to find solutions to our problems.

What we've learned:

A LOT! The whole reason we wanted to join this hackathon in the first place to learn new skills while also having fun and celebrating the end of our fall quarters. To start, we all learned how to use Android App Studio. Two of us had never used AAS before and one of us had minimal experience. We all really enjoyed learning how to use the different tools and emulators and want to continue learning post-hackathon. We also learned how to use the Google Maps SDK which was super cool. We also learned how to easily store data in the cloud using Firebase. The biggest thing we learned was how to debug. We ran into many unexpected errors and got a lot of practice reading documentation, Stack Overflow, and each others’ code.

What's next:

After smoothing out the edges of our app, doing more testing, and adding some additional features, we want to deploy our app to the Google Play Store. We also want to get more data for other areas in the US, especially those hit hard by the ongoing pandemic.

Built with:

We used Android App Studio (Java, Gradle, AVD Manager, XML), the Google Map Android SDK, and Google Firebase.

Prizes we're going for:

• Best Documentation
• Best Mobile Hack
• Best Healthcare Hack
• Best Beginner Software Hack
• Best Use of Google Cloud

Nathan Nishi
Andrea Dang
Collin Dang

Table TBD