KD Tech Days

At the STEMathon 2022, I won BEST PROJECT award!! It was a weekend of excitement, intense brainstorming, app design, and of course, staying up until ungodly hours. It was my first time participating in such a competition, and can’t wait to participate again next year!

Here’s my journey and experience of my very first STEMathon!

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The Brainstorming…

To start off with, our mentor, Gabby, was AMAZING. She got us right into that good knitty-gritty part of the brainstorming process, making us really think about what we wanted to do, and what problem we wanted to solve. Specifically, a problem that related to this years theme: Sustainability.

While I was good friends with one of my teammates (EDIT: my future Sumo Bot partner!), that wasn’t the case for all of them, so this brainstorming experience really closed the distance between us.

We eventually landed on a problem we wanted to solve: Food Waste.

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Our Idea: FOODABLE 🙂

Foodable is an app that helps people track their food, by reminding them of expiration dates, to reduce food that goes to waste.

Let’s take a deeper look into how this works:

• When the app first opens up, it comes to a loading page, with a fun fact to encourage our users to think sustainably. Clicking “open fridge” takes us to the home screen – an easy-to-use screen that can take you to all of our main features. 
• Let’s first take a visit to the “food list screen” where users can scroll through the food they have. 
• They do this through the “add food” screen where users can input the food that they have bought. If a product has no expiry date? No fear! Our app automatically makes predictions based on credible websites, such as the US Food and Drug Administration
• To be more efficient, users can also take a photo of a grocery receipt to scan their food into their list! Isn’t that neat?
• The benefit of uploading food to our app is to receive reminders on expiry dates from the “food list”, so people won’t let their food go to waste.
• You can also see your “foodable points” – points earned from using your food before it spoils, or extra points from using a recipe within the app. You can use these points to receive gift cards and coupons to grocery stores! 
• What if users don’t know what to do with unwanted food? Well, Foodable has the perfect solution!
  • Foodable offers recipe recommendations curated to what’s in your pantry – and, most importantly, what is going bad soon. 
  • Or people can choose to donate unwanted food to local food banks.

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Splitting Up!

One of the most hectic parts of the STEMathon is amount of material to prepare for our project before the deadline. With only 36 hours to finish everything, we weren’t expected to have more than a prototype or demo done (especially since it was virtual), we still had to get done our market research, general research on the topic, infographic, pitch and pitch slidedeck in addition to our actual product demo or prototype.

As a “Tech Person,” I took on the role of the creating the demo for our product. We had decided early on that designing an app would be the most preferable choice for our group, since everyone could help out and be directly involved with the product even though it we were a virtual team.

Link to Pitch: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/19XDLKh8oLhJqUXGQxcSqD42xg7o2WGjjrIdZfWq_pqM/edit#slide=id.p

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My Role!

I had to learn how to use a new app design tool, called Framer, to create this application prototype. Here’s a demo video below:

[Fun Fact: due to technical issues, there ended up being no audio in the demo video. So for the pitch, I had to explain the app perfectly timed to the video! (see bullet points above for app description) Talk about Stressful!]

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A Successful End!