SmartMeals

Objective

SmartMeals is an innovative financial literacy tool for students in high school or university who have purchased a meal plan from their school. A meal plan can be the first piece of exposure that a young adult has with budgeting and tracking larger amounts of money, which is why many students overspend and find themselves with a low balance towards the middle of the school year. SmartMeals intends to change that by teaching financial literacy through technological innovation and providing a mobile application that updates in real time, which shows students’ respective daily budgets and alerts them when they have 20% and 0% respectively of their daily budget remaining.

Ideals

SmartMeals ideally will be a mobile application that collaborates with many schools’ meal plan websites. After arriving at the SmartMeals login screen, the user will be asked to choose their school and their school’s external meal plan website will pop up, prompting them to enter in their school login details. The user will then receive their daily budget and our program will track their spending in real time on the meal plan. It will provide the user with a notification when they have 20% left on their daily budget and another notification once the entire daily budget has been used up. Each day, the budget will be adjusted according to the previous day’s spending and the total amount left.

Our program

We have done a representation of our ideal program through Java. In our program, the user enters in their name, student number, and meal plan details, mimicking the external login process. It will then let the user know their remaining daily and total meal plan balances. The user proceeds by entering the amount of their purchases and the remaining balances will be shown. When the user reaches 20% and 0% respectively of their daily budget, notifications will be shown demonstrating this. In this program, the user will need to manually enter in the start of the new day, but these features in our program will mimic our ideal program.