Isa Cruz

This past summer Zai Yang ’27 began a personal coding project following an online computer science class. The result? The Polar Plate: a website allowing Bowdoin students to view and rate meals from the daily menus for both Thorne Hall and Moulton Union.

“The website fetches the data from the Bowdoin Dining menu site, and it extracts the menu information from the site’s code and displays it in a clean and easy-to-read format on The Polar Plate,” Yang said. “So users can view the same menu that appears on the official site and quickly rate that meal.”

The roots of The Polar Plate go back to this past spring, when Yang took an online Coursera course and learned new computer science languages and frameworks. He used these newfound skills to develop the site, which is built with Next.js on the frontend and Express.js and Node.js on the backend. The Polar Plate also uses Playwright for web scraping and MongoDB for database storage.

To Yang, a computer science major, The Polar Plate was a valuable way to transform what he was learning into a project that would benefit the Bowdoin community.

“This project was a way for me to build something new with these skills in mind, because I’m a strong believer in project-based learning,” Yang said. “The only way to really deepen your skills in a computer science language or framework is to actually build something with it. It was just a way for me to strengthen my skills, and I was like, ‘Oh, why not build something that would be helpful to the community?’”

Yang began working on the project over the summer and continued his work in moments of free time during the cross country preseason. The website became fully functional about a month ago, with users now able to register an account and rate meals.

A challenge Yang ran into when designing The Polar Plate was compatibility with the unique quirks of the Dining Service’s website—namely, how the menus switch between breakfast, lunch and dinner during the day and then reset for the next day’s breakfast at 8 p.m. This is reflected in the timing of when users can rate each meal on the Polar Plate website: breakfast from 8 p.m. on the night before to 11 a.m. the day of, lunch from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and dinner from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.

“There were a lot of nitty-gritty details I had to work through,” he said. “I had to reflect [these details] in my app. It was just cool working around the Bowdoin website, the timing and the details to compile the information correctly.”

The way The Polar Plate navigates this dynamic and fetches data directly from the Dining Service’s website is Yang’s favorite part of the project. He notes that this allows users to rate menus without having to go to the original website to view them.

Yang also designed The Polar Plate with privacy in mind. User information is stored in a database with the password encrypted. Moreover, the ratings are stored in a separate database and tagged uniquely by the date of the meal.

“When users first log into the site their data is securely stored in a database. The password is encrypted before it’s stored. So everything is secure—not even I can see the password,” Yang said.

While he first began coding in high school when he took Advanced Placement Computer Science, Yang became more immersed in the programming world once he arrived at Bowdoin. In addition to taking computer science courses for his major, he also worked on the Interlibrary Loan system, which sparked his interest in website app development.

If he has time in the future, Yang hopes to implement additional features for The Polar Plate, including a history feature to allow users to view prior menus they have rated, and a friends feature, where users can add friends to see their ratings. In the meantime, however, he is excited for students to try out the website and share their favorite Bowdoin meals with each other.

“I just hope Bowdoin students will have fun rating the meals that they have and have fun comparing the ratings and seeing how others rate the meals too. Maybe they have similar opinions to other people about ratings, but maybe they have different ones,” Yang said.