my first hackathon experience
Childhood obesity is a preventable epidemic that is currently affecting more than a third of today’s children in the United States, regardless of race, ethnicity, family income or locale. Driven largely by unhealthy diets and eating patterns and lack of physical activity, it puts children at risk of serious, life-threatening health conditions in the future and negatively affects their performance in school.
Fortunately, there are many things that can be done to reverse this trend and for the last three years, the Partnership for a Healthier America (PHA) has been devoted to working with the private sector to help address this crisis. This past month, they hosted a Hackathon in Washington, DC in collaboration with The Feast, inviting designers, developers, strategists and high school students from the Academy For Software Engineering in New York City to help find tangible, creative solutions to end childhood obesity.
The two challenges at hand were (1) Helping teachers empower students to make healthy choices about the food they consume, whether at home or at school (2) Creating an information avenue that shows families the healthy food options and physical activity opportunities available to them locally.
Over the course of two days, on March 8 & 9, we hacked away at childhood obesity. We took on the task of how to make healthy choices the easy choice for families and children at school. There were two teams, schools and home, which each had 3 groups of 4 to 6 people. There were speakers and mentors coming around to the individual groups during the weekend Hackathon. Judging was based on 4 criteria: accessibility, innovation, impact value and user.
The IxDers that went down to DC consisted of Michie Cao, Effy Zhang, and Amy Wu. We were placed on three separate groups. Independently, each of our teams came up with a website as the platform of choice because the key insights were a) students are not allowed to bring their cell phone to school b) not everyone has a smartphone and c) some people have limited access to a computer.
Teams had 24-hours to prototype their ideas and presented to a board of nutritionists, teachers, PHA stakeholders and White House officials. The two winning teams presented their idea a week later at The Building a Healthier Future Summit, during which businesses, industry leaders, non-profits, academic and government counterparts, and First Lady Michelle Obama attended to discuss their achievements thus far and further solutions for the paramount issue.
An intense, action-packed weekend, we three had an awesome time. The Hackathon was a first for Effy and Amy. Some major highlights of our Washington, DC trip included: meeting and getting to work with people from other disciplines and backgrounds, being able to produce a tangible product in two day’s time, touring the National Mall and of course, getting to see the first lady as the closing keynote speaker!
Michie and Effy participated on the school end and I was working on a family oriented solution with my team.
My team consisted of three developers (which included one high school student), and two designers. We called ourselves Team SmartCart and our concept was a responsive website that allows any family to manage their SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) food budget wisely and learn how to cook different meals with their fresh produce through a curated recipe directory. A user would create a family profile, which includes the members within the family, and their food preferences, known allergies, and based upon these preferences recipes are generated. The recipes list could be further paired down through a filtering system, for example, depending on what type of cuisine they wished to cook for a particular meal. After selecting a recipe or recipes, a shopping list is populated for easy on the go use. All items on the shopping list are SNAP approved items.
We marketed ourselves as not just a pantry/shopping list manager. One clear competitor being the “Out of Milk” app, which many WIC (Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children) moms use.
SmartCart is a cooking and food shopping service that
1. Helps caretakers decide what to buy amongst SNAP-approved items based on two important factors
(a) custom preferences of budget, time, and individual family member’s needs (b) recipe generation and filtering system
2. Populating a shopping list to bring to the grocery store
3. Ability to print out or view on a desktop/smartphone the shopping list and recipe for later use
Ultimate Goal: To cook and enjoy a healthy meal with your family that can be prepared quickly and easily
You can find our group’s thinking, process, design and the data sets we parsed from on our hackpad. Here is our final presentation deck. And check out our working prototype on Flinto. Given the time constraint we had many additions for version 2.0, including a physical activity component.
Michie and Effy outlined their own experiences from the Hackathon and their key takeaways as well!
