What is your chosen theme and problem statement? Environment. In 2019, Singapore generated around 744 million kg of food waste. How can we tackle this growing problem and encourage Singaporeans to cut down on unnecessary food waste?
What does your hack do? Our hack is a Telegram Bot (@NommNommBot) that aims to raise awareness about food waste and offer simple and convenient solutions for individuals to reduce their food waste. There are multiple commands in the bot. The /search command allows users to choose a recipe based on whatever extra ingredients they have, and they also have the option to filter their choices based on their preferences. The /learn command educates users through multiple avenues, such as tips to cut down on food waste or providing informative videos for users to learn more about the significance of food waste. The /donate command provides users with the list of FoodBank drop off locations in their selected choice of region, which better enables the donation of excess unexpired food.
How does your hack answer the problem statement? We target a source of food waste being small quantities of leftover ingredients and sought to make either using it up or donating it more accessible for users of our Telegram Bot. One contributing factor to food waste in Singapore is leftover ingredients. Often, when ingredients that cannot be purchased in smaller denominations expire or spoil, people are forced to throw them away for lack of better options. For example, to make a dish requiring lemon slices, one must purchase a full lemon. However, after slicing the lemon into slices and using a few, there will be a small amount of lemon left that cannot be stored for long. People that are less experienced with cooking or lack the time to cook often elect to throw such small quantities of food away due to either lack of knowledge or laziness. Thus, our Telegram Bot provides an avenue for and encourages users to utilise or donate their leftover food items.
Moreover, our hack also provides tips and advice to educate users on the need to reduce food waste, in addition to giving them a few options to actively reduce food waste. Hence, our Telegram Bot adopts a multi-pronged approach to reducing food waste.
How did you build your hack? The telegram bot was built using Python and the API python-telegram-bot library. For the recipe search function, we integrated the search engine and filtering features of an API from the recipe website Edamam. For the donation bank locations function, we took the donation box locations provided by The Foodbank Singapore Ltd on their website.
What are some difficulties you overcame? Our team was mainly made up of amateurs, so we had a limited amount of prior programming experience. We had little idea of our desired Telegram Bot functionalities prior to knowing the problem statement. Hence, we had to do a lot of self-learning on the fly.
Our unfamiliarity with different API documentation also proved to be an obstacle, leading to many syntax issues.
24 hours was also a very short period of time, so we had to try to learn how to integrate multiple different python libraries and explore many possible methods to carry out our hack within a short time constraint. We had more ideas for other useful functions but were limited due to the APIs requiring paid plans. We also explored web scraping from websites for the purpose of your donation box location function, but had difficulty cleaning up the data to a usable format.
What was your biggest learning point from LifeHack 2022? Prioritising ease of use in a Telegram Bot requires keeping the target audience in mind. The prompt to make the product “boomer-friendly” encouraged us to use inline keyboard options, for example, instead of directly requiring user input.
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