Project: Toaster Oven Lovin’

Overview

The problem: Many college students have limited kitchen resources, limited cooking skills, limited time, limited access to grocery stores, and no access to creative recipes that respect these constraints. As a result, college students spend money to eat out, or eat non-healthy foods at fast food places or through vending machines.

The solution: Toaster Oven Lovin’ creates a way for students (on-campus or off) to learn and share recipes that:

• Can be made using minimal kitchen facilities (at a minimum, a toaster oven).
• Can be made out of ingredients that are available within walking distance of UH.
• Suit local taste sensibilities.
• Can be filtered via dietary restrictions (gluten-free, vegan, etc).
• Have an estimated cost per serving.
• Has an estimated number of servings per recipe.
• Has an estimate of how long it takes to make.

Approach

Students are typically just learning to cook for themselves, have limited kitchen facilities, and do not have time to shop around for ingredients. They are also price-sensitive.

The goal of this site is to help improve the nutritional content and variety of foods eaten by students and help them limit the use of vending machines or fast food products by providing tasty, realistic alternatives.

There are three roles in this system: students, vendors, and admins.

Students can both search for and contribute recipes. Recipes not only include the typical description of how to prepare the food and a picture of the completed food, but also information on where to obtain each ingredient and how much each ingredient costs. The recipe also indicates typical dietary restrictions for students (vegan, gluten-free, etc.)

Students do not necessarily have to determine the price associated with each item. Instead, there is another interface to the system for vendors. Vendors (local grocery stores and/or farmer’s markets) can login and establish a profile including their location and hours. Then, for each ingredient defined in the system, they can indicate

• Whether they stock the item.
• How much it costs to buy the item.
• What is the size of the item.

From this information, the system can automatically calculate, for each recipe:

• All of the places near campus where each ingredient can be found;
• What the prices are for each ingredient at each place.

Information on ingredient price and availability can be contributed either by vendors or by students.

There is also an admin role. Admins can edit all content in the system, remove inappropriate content, and establish users as having the vendor role.

Note: if you choose this idea for your final project, you cannot name it “Toaster Oven Lovin”. Come up with a different name for your final project.

Mockup page ideas

Some possible mockup pages include:

• Landing page
• User home page
• Admin home page
• Vendor home page
• User profile page
• Search recipe page
• Individual recipe page

Use case ideas

Whether or not the following bullet points list all pages or not, the completed use case should show an end-to-end scenario of using the system.

• New user goes to landing page, logs in, gets home page, sets up profile. (How do they learn how system works?)
• Admin goes to landing page, logs in, gets home page, edits site.
• User goes to landing page, logs in, browses recipes.

Beyond the basics

After implementing the basic functionality, here are ideas for more advanced features:

• Maps for locating vendors.
• Based upon open hours for vendors, indicate which ingredients can be bought right now.
• Ratings and review system for recipes.
• Ratings and review system for vendors.
• Notification system for vendors when new items are posted in recipes so they can update their listing to indicate whether they stock it or not.
• Notification system when price for a recipe drops substantially (i.e. a vendor puts an item on sale.)