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the "/start" command: a guide on how to navigate the bot
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the "/ordernow" command: buttons will pop up to let user select the canteen which they want to buy food from
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the "/canteen_1/2/3" command
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the "/myorders" command: this will be a list of orders which the user has already sent
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the "/balance" command will inform the user of his / her coin balance
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the "/vouchers" command let the user purchase vouchers with their coins available
Our team's chosen theme is "Environment" and we chose Problem Statement 1 involving the growing problem of food wastage in Singapore.
Our ideal solution is to use a Telegram Bot for pre-ordering of food in canteen stalls starting from schools. Users can key in their choice of canteen, specific stalls, and preorder their desired food whenever they want, and submit their order to the vendors. The vendors will be informed in advance how much food to prepare for a particular day and avoid cooking too much food which is wasted eventually. A 30-minute collection time slot is allocated based on users' choice of time to minimize crowd levels when picking up their orders.
The Bot features a coin system for discounts for orders within the bot. This incentivizes users to use the bot more frequently and more accurate data can be given to food vendors on how much to cook, hence minimizing food waste. Canceling the order multiple times will result in the deduction of coins. These facilitate the bot's main functionality which is to reduce food wastage from the vendors' side. Additionally, the recent news from MOE on the revision of school canteen food costs means it is time for the bot to be launched to offset the rising cost of food.
Our team comprises 4 people with 3 current NSF and 1 International Student currently overseas. We are completely new to coding and it has posed great challenges as we tried using Replit and PyCharm to build our Telegram Bot before finalizing on using Jupiter Notebook. We had to learn Python syntaxes and specific telegram modules on the spot, and conduct numerous trials and errors, before eventually creating the bot. We had tried our very best, but due to lack of time and coding experience, our submitted hack is just a prototype and is still not our ideal bot.
Ideally, the bot should be able to track orders submitted for a particular day and restrict further orders or modifications after a certain time to allow the data to be submitted to the vendors for preparation.
Our biggest learning point from LifeHack 2022 would be that great resilience and foreshadowing are required when we are facing conundrums. This event is an eye-opener for us in the programming world and we definitely would improve in the future.
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