Chowder Tracker

Inspiration

The dining halls at the 5C's make really good clam chowder. All of my teammates and I love getting a helping. There are a lot of dining halls on the 5C's and too often is my experience of just using a meal swipe, to see my team group chat saying there is clam chowder available at a different dining hall.

What it does

It checks the 5C menu website and returns whether there is clam chowder available today or not.

How we built it

We used selenium to pull all of the text from the 5c menu for the day, put each menu item into a different line in a text file, and then checked each line in the text file to see if Clam Chowder was available.

Challenges we ran into

We are all fairly new to coding, and it was difficult to pull text from a dynamic website when we only had experience on static websites, which led to a full night of dynamic website Python scraping tutorials.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The code works! We are also very proud that now we have a basic understanding of how selenium works

What we learned

We learned how to scrape a dynamic website.

What's next for Chowder Tracker

We will be able to use selenium to say which dining hall and what meal time has clam chowder, instead of just saying whether or not it is available today.

Ethics

A lot of the selenium code we learned how to use is from the selenium homepage, John Watson Rooney, and the Pycoach on YouTube. The rest of the code we learned how to do in class both CSCI4 at Pitzer. CS 51 P at Pomona.

Built With

• python
• selenium