For the Informatics course, Design Thinking, me and a teammate identified a problem of a fellow classmate and proceeded to define a general characterization of that problem that many people have. As someone that just started living by himself, our classmate, Evan, had troubles with figuring out his cooking lifestyle. He came in with little to no exposure on the basics of cooking as well as knowledge on recipes that he could make based on what he has or even just tracking the ingredients he owns and their shelf life. Studies has shown that only about 54-57% of adult cook (Birlson and Singleton, 2017). The variables leading to the lack of cooking may vary per person, but regardless, cooking will not only help people save money in the long run, but also benefit their health. About 67% of people who take cooking classes to tackle their cooking efficacy have learned new skills and gained more confidence in cooking on their own (Birlson and Singleton, 2017).
Problem Definition: There are plenty of people that cook by themselves throughout the world, but have little to no exposure to cooking. This results to people sticking to making very basic meals, accumulate expired food, and waste money on unnecessary groceries or eating out. Many people also may not have the motivation or time to learn and improve their cooking skills. This also means that very few people can enjoy the basic pleasures of homemade meals. As such, we will design an application that will strive to address all these problems. [Birlson, O. (2017). The Demonstration Kitchen: Gauging Participant Learning in Cooking Demonstrations. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics., 117(10), A139.]
We came up with a solution to create a gamified cooking application - COOKy. COOKy is a mobile game that includes features such as in-game navigation through recipes, gaining XP to level up, inventory for user's ingredients and ability to network with other users. Through MarvelApp, we designed a medium fidelity prototype of COOKy, including the icon (using GIMP) and various application screens. Following this step, my team communicated the solution as a video prototype.
As a frequent Starbucks drinker, I decided to take a look into what GIS analyzers take into account when determining new Starbucks locations for my final project in Principles of GIS. I used past course lab materials as well as a table of all Starbucks locations from around the world and census tract data from ArcGIS online for my analysis. I did a comparison between the correlation of population plus stores and median income plus stores. Overall, I concluded that as a multi-billion dollar coffeehouse chain, traffic, population and income were most likely not the only factors that contribute to Starbucks' growth and success in determining locations of future stores. You can read more about my project here...
Degrees Over Time is a shiny application that takes in data sets from the NCES regarding postsecondary education in the US to analyze trends for popular majors, potentially through a span of time. Through this interactive visualization, we hope to address the concerns of prospective and current college students that don't quite know what they want to do as well as assisting them by showing just how competitive each field of choice is. This visualization will give them a good idea of how much effort they will have to put in to get into the major they choose. Each page within the app strives to tackle each issue raised.
As a female UW student that lives on the UDistrict, walking around late at night might not be the safest choice. But I believe that not only females, but also everyone in general should be able to feel comfortable to take a run at night if they choose to. DubSafe is a wearable that's not only intuitive to use, but also accessible - designed for the Intellectuals Foundations of Informatics course. Accompanying the wearable is an app for customization and communication within the network of DubSafe users. Through the course, our project obtained the "Honorable Mention" award that was created during the display fair.
A simple prototype of the mobile application can be found on InVision
"Keeping Students Safe One Step at a Time"