-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 1
Starving Student Recipe Manager
There are a variety of professional cooking apps out there. They allow you to access large online databases of very nice and very fancy recipes. They also allow you to nicely plan out your daily meals, and pull up shopping list for the entire week. They will also tell you which foods are the most healthy and give you nutritional breakdowns of the recipes you look up.
**The problem is, students don't care about ANY of the things that these apps can do! **
When it comes to food, students care about the following things:
- How much does it cost
- How long will it take to make
- What can I make with what I have on hand
I propose to make an Android or iPhone-based recipe manager app that would store recipes for students. In order to appeal to students, it would need to do the above three things, which are the things that matter most to us. In this way we can help every starving student in the country to make his or her food dollars stretch as far as possible.
I will detail the above three characteristics of the app, as well as some additional issues that will have to be addressed by the dev team.
The app needs to store recipes that the student chooses to download from the web or inputs manually. It needs to display those recipes one by one so that the student can follow along as he or she is cooking. It also needs to do the things mentioned above which are meaningful to students.
Students care more about making cheap food than making nice food. Thus, every recipe needs to have a cost assigned to it based on the ingredients that it calls for. Somehow (this is where the dev team will get to show their innovative ability) costs of ingredients need to be determined and calculated before the overall cost of making the recipe can be calculated.
There should be a list view that displays recipes by cost of ingredients. For example:
Example search query by cost
This view will allow students to see which recipes will break the budget and which won't.
Students are often on the go, and need food quick. But who else is getting tired of Ramen? Students need something else but that can be cooked in the same amount of time. Thus, one of the priorities of this recipe database will be to help students find recipes that can be cooked quickly that don't cost very much. For example:
Example search query by time
How many of you has ever found himself sitting in his kitchen saying to himself, "What can I make with what I have around here?" We all have! That's what this app will be able to fix. Basically, the app needs to have a feature that allows users to input the ingredients that they currently have on hand. After doing so, the app will determine which recipes the user can make with the ingredients on hand. For example:
Example query with items on hand
With an interface like this, the student will be able to see what they can make with what they have on hand.
Most current recipe manager apps query big internet sites for their recipes, and only store the ones that the user chooses to download. Thus, the dev team wouldn't need to create a master database of recipes in order for this app to work because there are other databases that are already available.
Note: It would still be necessary for the app to have a local database of recipes that the user chooses to store.