Our after school App Club has entered its App My Pantry into the Congressional App Challenge. It will help people and communities save money, reduce food waste, improve health, and encourage families to cook at home.
The Application will help people save money by reducing food waste. Users can take an inventory of the food in their pantry. My Pantry tracks what they have, and when their food will become expired. By reminding users to eat what they already have in their house saves them money and reduces what they throw out.
My Pantry will track the calories that people consume compared to the calories that they plan to consume.
The Application takes the food you have on hand and finds recipes using the ingredients the user has in their house. That way, they are more likely to cook at home and use up what they bought. Users can rank the recipes they like the best.
Our students used cutting edge technology for the year 2019. It works on PCs, Phones, and Tablets. The program structure is client/server because the front end of our Application is on a personal device, and the back end of the Application resides in a database on the Cloud.
To code the Application, they needed to learn the following languages and Development Environments;
- SQL, Javascript and C# (c sharp) programming language
- Microsoft’s newest development suite of languages and interfaces of Power Applications and FLOW and Azure
- They connected search components to check out recipe websites.
- They learned to used Excel to load practice data to our back end SQL database
- They did most of our programming off of Google Chromebooks
- To collaborate, They used the integrated online environment of TEAMS
- They also started to modify the Canvas using the C# (C sharp) language
The Application uses modern 4GL, three programming languages, two forms of a database, and four different integration platforms to be able to program the Application.
In the future, they want to connect the Camera operation that they created to use bar scanning to make food inventory easier for users. The students would also like to see a donation feature added to their Application. If someone can’t use something in their pantry before it would spoil they want to program a way to find a place that can provide the item to someone in need.
The App Challenge judges have asked the team to look into protecting their intellectual property.
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