Teamwork

Final Summary

During the course of this quarter, we were able to make new innovations on the Extra Eats app as well as debug the already existing codebase. See the final slide summary above and screenshots of the new app below! Some innovations to note are error messages in the login and posting page, a working delete post button, scheduling posts ahead of time, alongside an updated UI and logo.

As a reminder of this project's purpose, we were asked by our community partner to create a reliable, easy to use app so that event planners could notify students about extra food. Our partner was the Santa Clara University Center for Sustainability, who we are handing off all of our work to.

Final Report

Gantt Task Planning Chart

Final Presentation Slides

Draft of Final Report

Project Reflection #2

Project Reflection #1

Project Introduction

Countless times, catering companies end up overestimating the amount of food to bring to events, resulting in leftovers that, at the end of the day, are thrown away. In the United States alone, as much as 40% of the food that is produced goes directly to the garbage (“How Much Food is Wasted in America?”, 2017). To put that into perspective, a landmass larger than China is needed to grow all the food that is ultimately wasted. SCU’s Center for Sustainability, however, has devised a solution for this problem. SCU’s Center for Sustainability is a team of SCU staff and undergraduate students (“Our Team”, n.d.). Their mission is to make SCU more environment-friendly by hosting programs and coming up with initiatives to help the university reach climate neutrality (“Center for Sustainability”, n.d.).

Lindsey Kalkbrenner, the director of SCU’s Center for Sustainability, proposed ExtraEats, a mobile application to notify SCU students when campus event planners have leftover food after their events. Event planners would be able to post a picture and description of the leftover food through the app, and a push notification would then be sent to all students who are registered through the app. Upon clicking on the notification or opening the app, students would see the latest post, which would include information about the kind of food, the pick-up location, possible allergens, and a time frame of its availability. Students would then be able to come and help themselves to the food. ExtraEats will significantly reduce the food wasted after events, and will also help students struggling with food insecurity. Therefore, our problem statement can be defined as: SCU students and event planners need a functional, reliable, and scalable ExtraEats app because it will help reduce food waste and food insecurity.

After interviewing Lindsey, we came up with a list of requirements and main objectives for the product. Specifically, the product has a range of non-negotiable features that must be implemented. We generated a list of customer needs based on Lindsey’s expectations, which includes that the app must: quickly inform users with photos of food using push notifications; have a photo upload feature that inputs snapshots from the phone’s gallery; display a live timer and location for where to pick up the food; use the SCU single sign-on; list food allergies; and, allow for scheduled posts. Since the app is partially completed, our job will be to improve upon the current app and to add on more features. Based on these customer needs, we were able to identify that most of our app’s specifications emphasize the importance of timing. One major customer need that Lindsey addressed was the ability to upload images faster. Our objective is to make this feature more responsive and require less time to complete. Secondly, we will improve the design of the application to make the UI more visually appealing to the user by introducing a new color scheme, which the UI team will help us with. Overall, as per Lindsey’s expectations, our goal is to implement these additions and launch the app by the end of the quarter.

References:

Center for Sustainability. (n.d.). Retrieved April 6, 2019, from Santa Clara University website: https://www.scu.edu/sustainability/

How Much Food is Wasted in America? (2017, September 18). Retrieved April 6, 2019, from Food Forward website: https://foodforward.org/2017/09/how-much-food-is-wasted-in-america/

Our Team. (n.d.). Retrieved April 6, 2019, from Santa Clara University website: https://www.scu.edu/sustainability/about/staff/