Inspiration
We are all UCSC students, and have been living here for a couple of months. As students, we understand the problems that are faced by many of the students in the University. We believed that there had to be a software that helps students through everyday life in UCSC, because all facilities in UCSC are separate, and it is very incoonvenient to access information. This is why we wanted to create an app that helps students navigate through everyday life with convenience.
What it does
Slug Life is an application that connects information from different UCSC facilities in one app for the convenience of the student. All things from dining hall menus to bus schedules are accessible from the Slug Life web app
How we built it
We utilized web scraping tools such as Pandas and Beautiful soup to collect information about incoming menus from dining halls for the week. We built an interface in which students can track UCSC loop buses through Google Maps functionality. The google maps APi was used to collect loop bus data and all data gets saved to our page. Our front-end interface allows for effective accessibility for both of our tools, and allows for maximum functionality.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into a couple issues especially with the Google Maps APi. It was difficult to collect information specifically from Loop buses, because the APi returns all bus data in the UCSC area. We had to sift through all bus information in Santa Cruz in ordder to narrow our data pool to loop buses. We also had trouble to web scrape data from the UCSC dining page, because of web scrape blocking that the UC system puts in place for all their websites.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were able to create a complete version of oyur envisioned product. We were really glad that the product is both functional, effective, and efficient.
What's next for Slug Life
We plan on adding a lot m ore features to Slug life, such as a collaborative feature where students can actively alert the app when they wait in line for the dining hall, so that students can keep track of the approcimate length of lines at the dining hall.
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